tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65577819950880335952017-08-17T07:07:51.869-04:00The Catholic Lit ClassroomThoughts on literature and Catholic educationMikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-44677119296384593542017-07-31T13:43:00.002-04:002017-07-31T13:45:30.861-04:00Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich and the Socially Mediated Self (LMM #4)<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bPWb4Tww8C0/WX9sKSxgBnI/AAAAAAAABIk/i0IQfA9JoLcMkTI_VkHQoQ27hWZnh0lQgCLcBGAs/s1600/The-Death-of-Ivan-Ilych-Pev.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="363" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bPWb4Tww8C0/WX9sKSxgBnI/AAAAAAAABIk/i0IQfA9JoLcMkTI_VkHQoQ27hWZnh0lQgCLcBGAs/s320/The-Death-of-Ivan-Ilych-Pev.jpg" width="219" /></a></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><div style="margin: 0px;">(This is the&nbsp;fourth installment in my Literature for the Modern Mind series. To learn more about the series, see <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/02/literature-for-modern-mind-introduction.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">This past year I had the opportunity to teach Leo Tolstoy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Death of Ivan Ilyich</i> for the first time. In re-reading the novella, I was struck by how well Ivan’s character, who orients his life around the avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of the approval of his peers, resembles the kind of self-understanding that our modern culture—especially social media—works to create in us.</div><a name='more'></a><br />The story begins at the end, with the aftermath of the death of the protagonist. We see Ivan’s colleagues learning of his passing, which occurred rather suddenly after a brief illness. Ivan was not especially liked or despised, and each character in this opening scene reacts to the news by thinking about how the death will affect him—how it will buoy his career prospects or saddle him with burdensome obligations. These men are professionals, and they think here as professionals—there’s no letting down of their goals to allow the death to affect them on a personal level.<br /><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">Only one of the men, Pyotr Ivanovich, has a moment where Ivan’s death penetrates his professional shell. He was one of Ivan’s closest friends, and out of obligation, he goes to the wake and pays his respects to Ivan’s wife. As she tells him of the suffering and death of her husband, Ivan grows cold and afraid: “Why, that could come for me, too, right now, any minute,” he realizes. But he allows this thought to occupy him only for a moment.&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But at once…the usual thought came to his aid, that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich and not to him, and that it should and could not happen to him, that in thinking so he had succumbed to a gloomy mood, which ought not to be done.</i></blockquote>For confirmation, he looks at his friend Schwartz, another colleague who, rather mischievously, has been plotting to escape the wake to make their weekly card game. Schwartz is not gloomy—he won’t even let his friend’s death alter his entertainment schedule. Pyotr, reassured by Schwarz’s expression, “began asking with interest about the details of Ivan Ilyich’s end, as if death was an occurrence proper only to Ivan Ilyich, but not at all to him.” By keeping Ivan’s death at arms’ length from himself, Pyotr can treat it as any other subject, and engage in respectable, proper conversation about it. He is successful in keeping the question of his own mortality at bay, and he moves on. Tolstoy’s narrative leaves the wake, and picks up Ivan’s story from beginning to end. We never hear from Pyotr Ivanovich again.<br /><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">We, the readers, are Pyotr Ivanovich.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">We, too, will hear about the death of Ivan Ilyich; we too, will see his sad bourgeois life and witness the agony of his last days. How will we react? Will we allow Ivan’s death to make us afraid? Or, like Pyotr, will we seek to push that emotion aside when it comes upon us?</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">Tolstoy draws Ivan to resemble the average man. He is the middle child, and occupies a position in the middle of the fourteen numbered rungs on the Russian public-employee ladder. He is mediocre in the way that the bourgeois are mediocre, never satisfied with actually being mediocre but always striving to move upwards in status. </div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">He lives a normal life, pursuing both pleasure and social approval. His career has a few bumps but overall he is awarded better and better positions in the courts. He marries his wife, Praskovya Fyodorovna not for love or beauty but because “he did something pleasant for himself in acquiring such a wife, and at the same time he did what highly placed people considered right.” His goal is to avoid unpleasantness of all kinds, and protect himself against “disruptions” of pleasure. Such disruptions include his wife’s jealousy and the death of two of their children, and to avoid this suffering he seeks refuge in his professional duties.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">As a court official Ivan’s profession provides him with a clear sense of right and wrong, of guilt and innocence, duty and obligation. The legal nature of Ivan’s job provides him with an ethical system entirely rooted in the rules and formalities of bureaucracy and liberated from the messiness of human lives. This code is predictable and consistent, and in finding solace in it Ivan’s life splits in two—on one side lies the rules stipulated by his profession, on the other his personal affairs. Consider the following hypothetical situation Tolstoy offers to explain this split identity:&nbsp;</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">…a man comes and wishes to find something out. As an unofficial man Ivan Ilyich can have no relations with such a man; but if there are relations with this man as a colleague, such as can be expressed on paper with a letterhead, then within the limits of those relations Ivan does everything, decidedly everything he can, and with that observes a semblance of friendly human relations, that is, of politeness. As soon as the official relations are ended, all others are ended as well.</i></blockquote><div style="margin: 0px;">Note that any friendliness or politeness that emerges between Ivan and his petitioner stems from the need to conduct official business—human warmth is not the root of his moral code but an effect of it, an expedient of the legal process. The letter of the law, in other words, has replaced the spirit in Ivan’s life.<br /><br /></div><div style="margin: 0px;">Ivan’s retreat into his professional identity allows him, so he thinks, to leave the messiness of human affairs behind. As a rule, Ivan does not like things that he cannot control and that are out of place. A spot on the tablecloth, or a decoration that has been bumped out of place, Tolstoy writes, “vex” Ivan to no end and he is not settled until they are made right. Appropriately, this fixation on getting the décor of his house just right—so as to fit correctly with popular taste—is what kills him, in the end. Ivan is not happy with his drape-hanger’s work, and brushes him aside and climbs the ladder himself to adjust them. Ivan slips, and bruises his side against the knob of the window frame. Though he doesn’t realize it at the time, he has bruised his kidney, which turns out to be fatal.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">The pain in his side grows, and Ivan now is forced—for the first time in his adult life—to confront discomfort head-on. The pain is not like the bent edge of the bronze ornamentation of his picture album, which vexes him until he bends it back and rearranges the photographs in the correct order. This pain—his mortality, our mortality—cannot be fixed; it must be accepted. It takes a good long while for Ivan to arrive at this realization, and the process is painful for him and those around him, but in the end, he does accept his own death. Once he does accept it, paradoxically, it ceases to be an obstacle to him: “Death is finished,” he says at the end. “It is no more.”</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">There is much more to this story than I can address in one post here. I think the character of Gerasim, Ivan’s servant and, characteristically for Tolstoy, an idealized peasant, is worth a whole post of his own. Gerasim cleans Ivan’s latrine and holds his legs on his shoulders to ease his pain, and only he is able to give Ivan what he really needs—pity. Because of his low status in society, Gerasim has not separated, as Ivan has, the professional from the personal, as his job of serving others has in fact required him to find joy in the discomfort that Ivan has spent his life avoiding. The human touch of Gerasim’s care makes Ivan’s whole life of professional success seem like a fraud, and Ivan knows it.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">If we think back to Pyotr Ivanovich’s moment at the wake when he willfully pushes aside his “gloomy” thoughts about death, we see that Tolstoy was setting up a central theme. A few days before he dies, Ivan comes to a chilling realization about similar moments in his own life:&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away—that the might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not right.</i></blockquote><div style="margin: 0px;">Like Pyotr’s momentary fear, which he brushes aside because he feels it not to be a socially acceptable emotion, Ivan’s entire life has been made up of moments when he pushed away uncomfortable inner movements. If a motion of his spirit was not desirable or socially appropriate (think of not only fear and anxiety but also emotions like childlike joy and deep grief), Ivan either willfully ignored it or, if that wasn’t possible, fled it in desperation. </div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">But these difficult and uncertain emotions, he realizes at the end of his life, were the very things to which he should have been paying attention.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">What Tolstoy has shed light upon here is the inability of modern individuals to listen to their innermost voices. God is within us already, and as Augustine says, knows us better than we know ourselves. “Our hearts remain restless until they rest in thee,” he famously claims, and we have been built with our impulses directed in some way towards fulfillment in God. Paying attention to things like fear, joy, and desire is of the utmost importance if we are going to discern God’s voice. Yet these things are precisely what Ivan’s career—and our own modern culture—keeps us from hearing. </div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">Our contemporary culture, by which I mean our unique American cocktail of scientism, consumer capitalism, and popular entertainment, wants us to think a few things about these inner movements. Not the least among them is that they are meant to be satisfied by some product. TVs, cigarettes, dimmer light switches, you get the idea—everything is made and marketed as a way to ease discomfort. Increasingly, the “products” that ease our discomfort involve curated images and text shared on social media in hopes that they are seen and “liked” by others. When we share a video of our kids being silly, our inner joy is filtered through a thousand eyes. It is all rather innocuous, of course, to share joyful things with those you love, but taken as a whole, how does our habit of seeking validation (after all, there is no “dislike” button!) of our inner life affect how we understand ourselves? Which emotions, like Pyotr and Ivan, do we train ourselves to push aside? Do we, too, look to Schwartz across the room to gauge whether our gloom is appropriate or not? </div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">After all, Pyotr and Ivan wanted to be liked, just as we do. Tolstoy’s characters share with us the human tendency, we might say, to “crowd-source” the spiritual life, and his story is especially appropriate for modern high schoolers, who know better than anyone how difficult it is to develop a spiritual life in an age of the curated, socially mediated self.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">For more on the ability of Silicon Valley to manipulate our inner lives, see one of my first posts on this blog, “<a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-self-as-marketplace.html" target="_blank">The Self as Marketplace</a>.”</div><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-91833778614162582412017-06-13T20:02:00.001-04:002017-06-14T14:40:30.961-04:00The Jacques Maritain Prize at Dappled ThingsI'm honored to have received <a href="http://dappledthings.org/11787/the-jacques-maritain-prize-for-nonfiction/" target="_blank">3rd place in </a><i><a href="http://dappledthings.org/11787/the-jacques-maritain-prize-for-nonfiction/" target="_blank">Dappled Things</a></i><a href="http://dappledthings.org/11787/the-jacques-maritain-prize-for-nonfiction/" target="_blank">' annual Jacques Maritain essay contest,</a> for my 2016 article on William Giraldi's <i>Hold the Dark. </i>I'm especially humbled to see the other names ahead of me--artist <a href="http://www.danielmitsui.com/" target="_blank">Daniel Mistui</a> and the philosopher/writer <a href="http://www.jamesmatthewwilson.com/" target="_blank">James Matthew Wilson.</a>&nbsp;Both are quite accomplished in their respective fields. Congrats to them and thanks to <i>Dappled Things</i> for the award.<br /><br />Sorry for the sparse blogging of late. I hope to return soon, once some upcoming events and obligations are behind us.<br /><br />See my original essay here: <a href="http://dappledthings.org/9303/catholic-novelist-confused-apologist-william-giraldi-and-the-nature-of-religious-fiction/">http://dappledthings.org/9303/catholic-novelist-confused-apologist-william-giraldi-and-the-nature-of-religious-fiction/</a>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-3868690841669911752017-04-25T23:37:00.002-04:002017-04-27T21:38:20.605-04:00Contemplation and Catholic Education: on Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Simone Weil<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S7tvry27xpc/WQCdyqPVWSI/AAAAAAAABHk/B3Eq-I3tj0IcZDr4s16uVv2vnbZq-DcUgCLcB/s1600/book-1091627_960_720.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S7tvry27xpc/WQCdyqPVWSI/AAAAAAAABHk/B3Eq-I3tj0IcZDr4s16uVv2vnbZq-DcUgCLcB/s320/book-1091627_960_720.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />I came across a great article published&nbsp;recently in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Journal of Catholic Higher Education</i>(Villanova U.) that argues that the distinct identity of Catholic education lies in religious contemplation. The author, an Irish professor named Rik Van Nieuwenhove, draws heavily on one of my favorite essays, Simone Weil’s <a href="http://www.hagiasophiaclassical.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Right-Use-of-School-Studies-Simone-Weil.pdf" target="_blank">“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View&nbsp;to the Love of God.”</a> I would upload a .pdf of the article, but it I imagine it wouldn’t be kosher, since Villanova doesn’t make it available online. <a href="https://www.academia.edu/31426932/Contemplation_Attention_and_the_Distinctive_Nature_of_Catholic_Education" target="_blank">Thankfully, the author has posted the piece to his academia.edu profile</a>, where you can view the article or even download it if you sign up for a free account, which I did.<br /><div style="margin: 0px;"></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"></div><div style="margin: 0px;">Van Nieuwenhove’s article is directed towards universities but he says nothing that can’t also be applied to secondary or even elementary institutions. He starts by arguing that Catholic education often tries to distinguish itself as “Catholic” by emphasizing its values—commitments to various social injustices and ecological concerns. These are important, he says, but they don’t distinguish a school as Catholic, just like a commitment to instilling “good moral character” in its students doesn’t set a school apart as uniquely Catholic. Some secular values are also religious ones. But the religious values that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aren’t</i> secular are the ones that are distinct, and most important to religious identity. Spirituality is not reducible to morality, in other words. Morality explains how we act in the world, but does not explain the vision that calls us to that action.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">To explain that unique vision, Van Nieuwenhove turns to the Catholic understanding of contemplation, drawing heavily on Weil and Thomas Aquinas. Contemplation entails knowing and loving God, he says, and any moral system Catholicism has proceeds from its spiritual dimension. Knowledge and love of God come first; action follows. </div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">How does one “teach” contemplation, though? Van Nieuwenhove isn’t talking about classes in meditation. He rightly equates contemplation with “detachment” and a radical “selflessness that allows us to be really present to the world, others, and God himself.” As Weil argues, this kind of attention is entirely receptive, achieved not by furrowing one’s brow in concentration but by a patient waiting. It is a “negative effort.” Understood this way, every class becomes a training in contemplation. Biology can demand this kind of attention just as well as English or Theology can. I love the image Weil uses in her essay to explain this:&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is…a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.</i></blockquote>What a great way to put it—“reject all inadequate words.” In this view, the information a student learns is secondary to the insight he or she has. Insight arrives, Van Nieuwenhove argues, not via our reason but via our intellect, and he uses Aquinas’ distinction between the two realms of our understanding to set firmly his definition of contemplation in the scholastic tradition. This probably a good choice on his part, as Weil, for all her brilliance, was a bit nutty, and Aquinas’ reputation carries quite a bit more weight. If Aquinas can be seen to advocate for this kind of contemplative learning, well, maybe we should all pay attention.<br /><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">I would encourage you to read the whole article, as Van Nieuwenhove addresses more than I can summarize in a blog post. His points are ones that I have written about before on this blog, and that I have been thinking about a lot recently, especially after reading and <a href="http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pedagogy-distracted" target="_blank">reviewing Nicholson Baker’s <i>Substitute</i>,</a> a book that does a remarkable job of capturing the chaos of the modern American classroom. <br /><br />There, action, noise, and busy-ness reign. Schoolchildren will always be noisy, grade-schoolers particularly, but this chaos is especially a problem in high school classrooms. High schoolers are more mature than grade schoolers (at least most of them are!), and they are ready to develop in their ability to think slowly and deeply. Modern pedagogy stunts this inner growth. “Keep the students busy,” seems to be its unwritten motto, and a high schooler, once he or she graduates, might have done a lot of group projects, worksheets, PowerPoints, learning games, etc., but they all amount to a big pile of little snippets. If students submit to this system they might learn how to work hard and to navigate a bureaucracy, but will they have learned to know and love what is true? Will they have developed the habit of patient attention, which Weil equates with prayer? In other words, will they have become more human?</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">Near the end of her essay, Weil, seemingly off-handedly, unloads a stunning insight, which effectively addresses the problem Van Nieuwenhove sees in Catholic schools putting the cart of social justice before the horse of contemplation. Weil:&nbsp;</div><div style="margin: 0px;"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. <b>Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.</b> The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough</i> [emphasis mine].</blockquote>To learn to pay attention, then, is to learn to love our neighbors. Saints like Mother Teresa understood this, and devoted themselves to the direct care of the poor, not to fund-raising or mobilizing resources or other skills of 21st-century entrepreneurial humanitarians. It’s too bad that categories like “social justice” and “concern for the poor” are broad enough to encompass both types of charitable approaches, for they are by no means equal. In Weil’s understanding, to pay attention in Biology class or in History is to develop the habit of loving contemplation, which is exactly what social justice demands, and what bestows on morality its true coherence.<br /><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">I’m not sure what kind of readership <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Journal of Higher Education</i> has among Catholic educators in America. Interesting that Van Nieuwenhove is publishing this in an American journal, and not an Irish or British one. I haven’t read his other work, but it includes an impressive list of scholarship on medieval theology and mysticism in particular (books on John van Ruysbroeck and Thomas Aquinas, among others, published by places like Notre Dame and Cambridge UP). I don’t know what it’s like in Ireland, but it’s too bad ideas like his don’t get more traction in our&nbsp;Catholic education circles. In general, the only interactions that happen between the worlds of secondary- and higher education seem to involve Education departments in universities, not academic subject areas. You rarely hear college English professors speaking at professional development seminars for high school English teachers, for example. Very frustrating, and counterintuitive, in my mind.</div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">There is hope, though. More and more people are becoming aware that contemporary pedagogy starves the soul. Charter and classical schools are growing exponentially, which at the very least tells us that parents are seeking alternatives to the standard model. I would argue that the “keep them busy” pedagogy we see in Baker’s book fails precisely because it ignores the most human aspects of an education, things like desire, beauty, and the cultivation of the imagination. That is, it fails because is not grounded in something like contemplation. </div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">I would encourage you to read Van Nieuwenhove’s entire essay, as well as Weil’s letter, if you already haven’t. I hope to write more about Weil myself, but for now I will direct you to <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/10/attention-and-unplugged-classroom.html" target="_blank">my initial post about her letter</a>, from a few years back.</div><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-72778830872195481212017-04-08T14:17:00.003-04:002017-04-08T14:17:50.712-04:00Follow me on TwitterSay it ain’t so! After much back-and-forth between the angel and devil on my shoulders, I decided to join the wide world of Twitter (I’m not sure who won the argument…but I don’t really think I want to know). <br /><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">I don’t plan to do much original Twittering, but to use the medium to give more visibility to this blog and my writing in general. I will Tweet out new posts, and probably some old ones, too, so if that is your platform of choice, I invite you to follow me: <a href="https://twitter.com/Mike_StThomas" target="_blank">@Mike_StThomas</a></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;">And you can always contact me the (relatively) old-fashioned way: thecatholiclitclassroom@gmail.com</div><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-10441340178809221142017-04-03T20:17:00.001-04:002017-04-27T21:39:02.812-04:00More thoughts on Nicholson Baker's Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JzgmoqXZwnU/WOLmDC2-5xI/AAAAAAAABGs/4jQE4j6AV5cxiv8Onxr_xMzifnBrReiqQCLcB/s1600/9780399160981.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JzgmoqXZwnU/WOLmDC2-5xI/AAAAAAAABGs/4jQE4j6AV5cxiv8Onxr_xMzifnBrReiqQCLcB/s320/9780399160981.jpg" width="241" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Commonweal</i> Magazine’s latest issue contains my review of Nicholson Baker’s <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Substitute-Going-School-Thousand-Kids/dp/0399160981" target="_blank">Substitute</a></i>, in which the best-selling novelist observes classroom life in your everyday American public school. <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pedagogy-distracted" target="_blank">You can read the piece here</a>. I found the book to be a painfully accurate depiction of life on the ground in our educational technocracy. In this post I'd like to include some observations that I didn’t have the space or time for in the review itself, not the least of which is the book’s relevance to Catholic educators.</div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">More on that subject later, though. Firstly, it took me a while to warm to Baker’s position here. As a teacher myself, I couldn’t help but resent what I saw as hubris in his waltzing into a classroom as a substitute—his first time ever as a teacher—and imagining that his observations were insightful enough to publish to great influence. He largely refrains from editorializing, but if you read between the lines you can tell which teachers he considers buffoons, which ones are vile, and which ones are saints. This all seems a bit unfair, though it does not mean his points are inaccurate. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Baker seems to recognize that his role puts him at a significant disadvantage, in that he only sees a group of children for one day at a time, and, though he does see the same kids on several different days, he doesn’t know them nearly as well as their real teachers do. To protect privacy he has changed all the names in this book, from the school district itself to the children in his care. This presents a problem, though, because in assigning fake names to everyone, he deceives the reader into thinking that he is on a first-name basis with everyone. He’s not. A substitute teacher, over the course of a 45-minute class period, internalizes the names of maybe 5 kids, and probably not until the last 10 minutes of that class period. When Baker sits down at a new desk at the beginning of a school day, and a student walks into the room swinging his iPad around in its case like a nunchuck (kid are constantly doing that in his school), Baker would see the student as simply a nameless kid acting like a teenager, not “John,” or “Jim,” or “Brock,” or whatever name Baker gives him for the sake of convenience. It’s disingenuous, and though it may be an innocuous mistake, it speaks to the larger issue with his role as a substitute critiquing an atmosphere in which he, more or less, is a stranger. His position is much like that of a new babysitter. If a teenager came into a family’s home for an evening to watch over the kids and later chastised the overwhelmed, stressed-out mother for yelling, we would rightly cry foul. It’s not a babysitter’s place to offer a critique.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So why did I end up giving the book a positive review? Because when a family is dysfunctional enough, even the babysitter will notice it. Baker’s role as a substitute only allows him to experience a sliver of what a real teacher does, but a sliver is all he needs to see.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve written about that dysfunction directly in the review, so I won’t rehash it here, but suffice it to say that modern pedagogy only knows how to engage with students through one thing—work. Class consists of keeping kids busy, getting them to process information, fill out worksheets, complete online quizzes and games, and Baker does a great job of keeping these kinds of frenetic bureaucratic exercises in our focus, even though it makes for an exhausting book to read (imagine what the day is like for the students). The teachers who succeed are the ones who actively work against the busy-ness to carve out time for real conversation, discussion, lecturing, and story-telling. The push-pull between the students who don’t want to work and the teachers whose job it is to get them to work is felt on nearly every page, and rightly so. Some variation of “just quiet down and do your work!” is on the tip of every modern teacher’s tongue, ready to be fired out to settle down their classroom for 3-4 minutes of productivity before they need to raise their voice again.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Teachers have wrestled for silence in every age, I’m sure, but the modern school seems uniquely set-up for these kinds of battles. Why? Because its insistence on teaching the skill of processing information hardly appeals to a student’s genuine curiosity. Facts are not interesting in themselves. Without a larger purpose, processing information and thinking critically aren’t attractive activities. In order to “succeed” and keep busy in the modern classroom students need to be cajoled, distracted from what they are actually doing, and promised rewards like iPad time.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Take, as a case in point, the acronyms ubiquitous in a K-12 school system. Baker notices several of them in the course of his month-long stint as a sub. Students are encouraged to set “SMART” goals: “Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.” There is also “FASTT Math, which stands for “Fleuncy and Automaticity through Systematic Teaching with Technology.” Students are encouraged to use their “writing VOICES”: Voice, Organization, Ideas, Conventions, Excellent Word Choice, and Sentence Fluency.” Why all of these acronyms? I think it’s simple, actually. Because these chopped-up skills are not things that have any inherent attraction in their own, because they have no beauty that draws students to them, they must be funneled into a gimmicky word or phrase, and VOILA! they are suddenly sexy. It’s pedagogical sleight-of-hand (don’t pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!), but kids can see right through it, especially when they get to middle- and high school. The same can be said, too, for the educational taxonomy posters that are everywhere in American classrooms. Putting exclamation points after various critical-thinking skills and hanging them on the wall is the fastest way to send your students the message that you have given up on interacting with them as one human being to another. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Students need beautiful things. They need to read stories, to have their natural curiosity piqued so that they want to investigate more on their own. They are fully capable of this kind of attentive engagement, but we only see it, as Baker says, when students say the pledge of allegiance or are read fiction aloud. This is not surprising, because these are two activities in which students acknowledge that they are part of something larger than themselves, and therefore that there is some deep purpose to what they are doing. Fostering more of this kind of spirit requires less activity and more receptivity. Simone Weil writes about this in <a href="http://www.hagiasophiaclassical.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Right-Use-of-School-Studies-Simone-Weil.pdf" target="_blank">her letter on the subject ofreligious schools,</a> in which she argues that the role of a school should be to teach students how to pray; that is to say, how to pay attention, how to give themselves over completely to the subject at hand. The letter is remarkable; <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/10/attention-and-unplugged-classroom.html" target="_blank">I’ve written about it before</a> and hope to again. Weil’s advice is a far cry from the modern ethos, which just might be “how to keep kids busy.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What should Baker’s book mean for Catholic educators? He observes life in a public school district, but insofar as his book depicts modern pedagogy accurately (and I would argue that it does), it directly addresses the issue of Catholic schools. Baker would have found a similar environment there, for though they generally out-perform public ones, most parochial school systems use the same textbooks and follow the same educational practices.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">More and more parents are opting out of the public school model, choosing instead to send their children to charter schools, the number of which has more than doubled in the last decade, and classical schools, which have grown at similar rates. Clearly something is not working, and as the modern educational system grows more and more focused on informational acquisition and processing—which is to say, less and less involved with anything resembling the liberal arts—the problems that arise in Baker’s book will only get worse.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ll close by recalling one of Dickens’ famous opening scenes, from his novel <i>Hard Times</i>. The setting is a school in industrial England. The school very much resembles a factory, and the aptly-named Mr. Gradgrind opens by shouting to his students that “in this life, we want nothing but Facts… nothing but Facts!” The class is studying horses, and he calls upon a young girl for a definition of a horse. The girl’s father works with horses and, therefore, she grew up with them and knows them better than anyone in the class. Yet she cannot speak—how to put into words and categories that which she knows so intimately? Gradgrind denounces her for being “possessed of no facts.” He instead calls upon a boy named Bitzer (Dickens’ names are the greatest), who spits out an encyclopedic litany of horse facts: “Quadruped. Gramnivorous…four eye-teeth, twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring…Age known by marks in mouth…” Bitzer is the ideal student in Gradgrind’s factory of facts. His answer is exactly right, which is to say, exactly wrong, for Dickens reveals just how out of touch such an education is with human nature. Bitzer knows nothing about horses except which terms they are assigned…and that is exactly what Gradgrind, and the system, desires.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, Dickens is writing fiction, and his exaggerations make the factory school look ridiculous. But how different are Gradgrind and his facts from the data-driven worksheets and rubrics of our modern system? In spite of the limitations of Baker’s role as a sub, he reveals them to be eerily similar. Baker’s book has gotten lots of coverage in the secular press; I hope it gets some attention in Catholic schools as well.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-6760920582647291142017-03-28T19:40:00.000-04:002017-04-27T21:41:40.462-04:00Community, Consumption, and the Canon (Part 2)<div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2017/02/community-consumption-and-canon-part-1.html" target="_blank">In my first post</a>, I discussed Augustine’s idea that a community is bound by common “objects of love,” by real things which people experience in common. I hope here to use that definition to get a better handle on why the canon—the art and ideas that are foundational to our culture—needs to be central to any academic community.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">The arguments “against” the canon are not without merit. I don’t think I have to rehash them in their entirety here, but more or less I’m speaking of the movements that gained influence in the last half-century or so in the academy and sought to de-centralize university curricula. That is, they sought to move the focus of our academic departments –especially the Humanities—away from what was written by Dead White Males and towards groups who existed, at least historically, at the margins of Western culture. By almost every standard, this movement has succeeded. Outside of only a few religious or staunchly conservative institutions, most colleges and universities now are well stocked with all kinds of departments unheard of until recently: Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Latino Studies, Caribbean Studies, LGBT/Gender Studies, etc. And if you take a course in, say, English Literature, you would be forgiven if you thought you had walked into one of these courses instead. More so than gaining brick-and-mortar departments in universities, the movement has wildly succeeded in gaining sway in terms of ideology; read Shakespeare in an English course today and chances are, your professor will constantly bring the lenses of the aforementioned cultural studies to bear on the text. It’s the party line for literature professors.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The de-centralizing movement has good points, no doubt. Western culture, as history makes clear, certainly has its blind spots. And yes, the canonical works, because they were written by Dead White Males, espouse the values of Dead White Males and all of these blind spots. No argument there. I think its mistake, though, lies in its assumption that, as an “accepted list” of great books, the canon functions as a propaganda machine, imposed from the top down by authorities who seek to maintain power. In short, the idea of a canon is a textbook example of what the modern academy would call hegemony.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What this assumption overlooks, though, is the organic nature of the canon. The great works are not unlike striking features of a landscape, an analogy I tried to tease out in my first post. Things like mountains, rivers, and rock formations continuously hold the attention of the residents of the surrounding area. Their gazes naturally return to these places, as do their thoughts. They give names to them, perhaps revere them (think of a Native American tribe), and understand themselves in relation to them. These distinct features, in holding their common attention, create a community. Things like these are Augustine’s “objects of love.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">That thing which we have come to call Western culture, for all its foibles and missteps, is held together by something similar—the stories and ideas and works of art to which our gazes have returned for centuries. &nbsp;Sure, the list of “approved” works—Homer, Plato, Chaucer, Dante, the Gospels, etc.— have become “codified” (if that is even the word) in what we have come to call, loosely, the canon, but they have been so institutionalized because of their influence in shaping who we are and how we understand ourselves.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Even the most strident deconstructionists have their own canon, though they might not identify it as such. It would include thinkers like deBeauvoir, Derrida, Benjamin (say it with me…<i>Ben-ha-meen</i>) or perhaps some others, but regardless, to speak of a community at all is to delineate those things which are inside and those things which are outside. Communities are defined by what is held in common, and, though this does not mean there is no room for dissent within a community, it does mean that there comes a point where we must acknowledge that, as Yeats put it, “the centre cannot hold.” You can only de-centralize so much before a community ceases to be a community.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Why am I writing about all this? Hasn’t it been all said before? Well, to some extent, yes. But I think this is an opportune moment, historically, to consider questions about what it means to speak of a community. The left and right both seem to be fragmenting, accelerated by the echo chamber of contemporary media. And, as I mentioned in the first post, consumerism is behind it all—more than anything else, consumer capitalism created and fuels this media climate. It is as if a company got everyone together, sold each person a microphone and hand-held speaker, and told them to have a blast. Chaos, of course, is bound to ensue—but that company’s CEO is set for life.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I also think that most defenses of the canon fail to address the underlying issue of community. Not all, of course. But too often its defenders argue for the canon by referring to the merits of its ideas, or of its art itself. This approach is ultimately ineffective in the face of an opposition that is founded on incommensurable principles. (Alasdair Macintyre explores this problem of incommensurability in broader terms in <i>After Virtue</i>, and his insights are excellent.) What some see as the “merits” of Plato’s thought, for example, are precisely those things which disqualify it for others. Perhaps those merits are in fact merits, and it is the job of the liberal arts to explore that possibility through close reading, discussion, argument, etc. But there is a more fundamental reason why a student should study Plato: his thought has tremendously influenced the way we understand ourselves today. All philosophy and politics are footnotes to his own; they proceed from arguments made against his. The way our cities are organized, the way our judicial system proceeds, all trace their roots to Plato (and thus Socrates). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Plato is but one example, of course, but hopefully my point is clear. If we desire to have an intellectual community, we must study the most influential works of Western culture, because that is the culture that happens to be ours. It is the culture that gave us the university itself. This does not mean there is no room for studies of other communities, of historically marginalized or recently emergent ones, but it does mean that, as long as we hope to maintain anything resembling an “academy,” we must continually return to the canon. Ignoring it would be to give up any pretense to a genuine intellectual community.<br /><br />Speaking of the broader world outside of academia, it used to be that popular art filled that unifying role for us. Think of the plays and shows and music from the 20th century that everyone seems to know. Put on “Born to Run,” and people will start singing along and start reminiscing about when they saw The Boss. Start humming “Yellow Submarine” and be prepared to hear everyone within earshot belt out the chorus. Or consider, as I did in the last post, the proportion of Americans who watched shows like Cheers and M*A*S*H*. Now, pop culture is another area in which consumerism has found ways to separate us. We have options galore, and we watch or listen largely in private (even when we’re in public). The music we listen to, it seems, has become something not unlike the brands of clothing we wear—they are facets of our personal style, and we sink deeper into our own individual interests we move farther and farther from those “objects of love” that would otherwise hold us in common.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Returning, at least in our study, to gaze at the most prominent features of our intellectual landscape will do quite a bit to restore our links to each other and to our past. It is not unlike the idea that we need to return to nature—to the first “objects of love”—to restore ourselves.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-42560998747304007762017-02-21T15:54:00.000-05:002017-04-27T21:41:40.447-04:00Community, Consumption, and the Canon (Part 1)What makes a community? And what sustains it? Important questions in any age, and certainly in ours, for whatever glue it is that holds us together has never seemed more brittle.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />One way to understand this topic is to think of community as a group of individuals with a shared sense of what is beautiful. That is, a community is identified by its common gaze. Augustine thought along these lines when he suggested, in <i>City of God</i>, that “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.” The bonds of community are forged not by something nebulous like “good will” but by real things in the world, when they are admired in common.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Think about it. The earliest communities held the landscape in a common gaze. The mountain that towered over a prehistoric village quite literally bound its inhabitants in a shared sense of awe, a natural response to their surroundings. You could even argue that the earliest religions emerged from this pull that natural features had on communities. We see this today, with our modern concept of national landmarks—we still think it is important to set aside and officially recognize certain parts of the landscape (mountains, geysers, beaches, glaciers) that draw our attention, and our wonder.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You could argue that the smallest unit of community—a family—is bound together by something similar to a common landscape—those peaks and valleys and rivers that make up a lifetime of shared experience. Though members of a family may live separate lives for much of their adulthood, they are nevertheless united by those formative experiences which they faced together, and those particular moments that they recognized as beautiful. I’m using the word “beautiful” liberally here; I don’t simply mean objectively stunning specimens, such as a thundering waterfall or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. By “beauty” I mean to imply those things which invite our gazes to linger, those certain experiences that draw our attention more than the rest. “Beautiful” things, in this understanding, don’t necessarily have to be pleasurable: a family trauma, for example, can draw a family’s collective attention as well as a vacation in a stunning natural setting can. Both kinds of experiences bind individuals together as a community.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Understanding community in this way helps us see how consumerism works against it. By its nature, consumerism must divide and conquer, to maximize its profit. You never see advertisements directed towards a group, or a family. For a company to possess real security in the free market is have its talons firmly sunk into individual lifestyles, into the habits of people. Cigarettes. Earbuds for your playlists. Personal screens for your shows. The more inroads industry makes into our daily routines, the more successful it is, and the more distant we become from each other.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This struck me a while back when I was playing pub trivia with some friends. The final question asked us to rank the top viewed TV-show finales of all time. One would think that the most recent TV shows would have had the most viewers, since TV ownership and the total population have both increased in the past decades. However, the most-watched finale was 1983’s M*A*S*H, with 106 million viewers, followed by shows like Cheers (1993) and The Fugitive (1967).&nbsp; Seinfeld (1998) was not far behind. Why did the older shows have more viewers than modern ones? The reason, when I thought about it, is actually pretty obvious: there were fewer shows in the days before companies like HBO, Netflix, and Amazon entered the market. More people watched the same show because there were fewer options, plain and simple. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If you wanted to watch the M*A*S*H finale, you had to watch it at the same time as everyone else—there was no DVR, of course. The stats are staggering: sixty percent of American TVs (60!) were tuned in (that’s sixty percent of ALL television sets in the country, on or off), and of all the TVs that were turned on during the time the finale ran, 77% were tuned to M*A*S*H. The only numbers that approach those statistics now are huge sporting events like the Super Bowl, and even then, you need to look to the local markets of the teams playing to see so many people tuned to the same event. 54% of all Boston TVs were tuned to this past year’s Super Bowl, 81% of those that were on.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If the strength of a community depends on shared experience, we are in big trouble. I remember riding in a fifteen-passenger van to cross-country meets as a high schooler, long rides, usually to places 3 or 4 hours away, and we passed the time in various ways. Some kids read, some listened to music on Walkmans or Discmans, but for the most part, the hours we spent together were full of laughter, inappropriate stories, annoying songs, and the like. Back then, people in a shared space had no choice but to be present to each other. In my time as a teacher and coach I’ve gone on similar bus rides. Now they are eerily silent. Everyone—and I mean everyone—has his own screen and headphones, the world’s library of music and videos and games available to each thanks to data plans or the Wifi available on some of the swankier busses. Being together no longer means sharing a common experience.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If Augustine’s thoughts on the nature of communities are true, we can’t be surprised that ours have fragmented in the consumption-driven modern era. In substituting private for shared experience, consumerism works to undermine our common culture by actively turning our attention away from those “objects of love” we share. When you think about it, you could spend weeks at a time only speaking to another human being when you are handing them payment for a service: the check-out lady at the supermarket, the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru clerk, the kid at the dry cleaners’. Someone can live what by all societal standards looks like a happy, well-adjusted life and not encounter another human outside of commercial exchanges.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal">What will turn us back to real community? It all hinges on cultivating common "objects of love." That’s where the canon comes in. In an upcoming post I’ll try to make the case that reading and discussing the great works are essential to any hope we have of sustaining what’s left of our intellectual community. Stay tuned.<o:p></o:p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-24395013821051567272017-01-17T13:12:00.000-05:002017-04-27T21:42:32.832-04:00Sir Gawain and the Sin of Self-Preservation (LMM #3)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YjR_cbye2fM/WH5eMyL1RZI/AAAAAAAABFs/r1uCHhmJZGYMtZTpF6Y6u88AQoG3h3u_wCLcB/s1600/Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YjR_cbye2fM/WH5eMyL1RZI/AAAAAAAABFs/r1uCHhmJZGYMtZTpF6Y6u88AQoG3h3u_wCLcB/s320/Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight.jpg" width="252" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>(By Unknown - http://gawain.ucalgary.ca, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=621711)</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>This is the third installment in my slow-to-develop “Literature for the Modern Mind” series. For an overview of what it’s all about, see <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/02/literature-for-modern-mind-introduction.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Lately I’ve been thinking about the role Catholic education plays in helping students understand the ways in which our Christian inheritance comes into conflict with the modern technocracy. My recent article on <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/st-midas%E2%80%99s-prep" target="_blank">“St. Midas’ Prep”</a> deals with this subject directly, and as I’ve thought about it more and more, I’ve come to conclude that everything at stake here can be boiled down to one essential question: Does the world exist for us, or do we exist for the world?<br /><a name='more'></a><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The modern world by default trains students to think of their academic pursuits largely in terms of self-interest: What’s my grade? What skills can I acquire? What will look good on my resume? How will this affect my earning potential? and so on. The Christian vision, on the other hand, remains tied to the cross, hung with the body of a man who, in that great paradox, gained everything by giving of himself. One work of literature which attempts to give shape to this paradox is <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i>, an Arthurian romance in which the title character must learn the virtue of true humility by submitting himself to a radical act of abnegation.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">First, some context. The medieval chivalric romance is a familiar genre even to those who have never read a proper one, thanks to its narratives of knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress. In the English-speaking world, especially, the King Arthur stories and others of their type have permanently fixed themselves in our cultural architecture, though their inheritance is a mixed bag. The medieval genre paved the way for Harlequin paperbacks, trashy romances with some shirtless Fabio on the cover holding a long-haired lady with head thrown back. Yet comparing corporate smut to the medieval form is like comparing Christian-bookstore kitsch to the Chartres Cathedral. Though there were usually beautiful ladies involved in most of these stories, winning their affection or rescuing them served a higher goal. The real purpose of a knight’s quest was inner transformation, usually effected by the pursuit of noble ideals, and manifest in dragon-slaying, lady-winning, and confrontation of all kinds of evil.</div><br />Perhaps it’s easier to understand the genre by its most famous parody, <i>Don Quixote</i>. Written by Miguel de Cervantes at the turn of the 17th century, <i>Quixote</i> set out to make fun of the narratives of “knights-errant” (adventure-seeking knights), which by that time had become all the rage in the publishing industry. Most people can recall the premise of the story: an aging Spanish bachelor has read so many of these stories that he himself decides to become a knight, and saddles up an arthritic steed and goes off in search of adventures, with a roly-poly drunk by his side (Sancho Panza). Quixote creates adventures where there are none. Through his eyes, homely Spanish maids become beautiful women in peril, an inn becomes a high-walled castle, and, most famously, windmills turn into long-armed giants. Nearly all of the adventures end with some combination of Quixote, Panza, and Rocinante (the horse) bruised and humiliated, but Quixote remains undaunted, and they push on to yet another adventure (the complete book, published in two sections, runs to nearly 1000 pages).<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Something strange happens over the course of the story: the audience, always laughing at Quixote, also starts to laugh <i>with </i>him. There’s a certain joy in him; a man so earnest and committed to his own imaginative vision is hard to dislike for long. Quixote’s apparent folly turns out to be his success. Though he fails at every point along his journey we realize that his real achievement lies not in his actions but in his way of seeing. His eyes are like those of a child; his imagination directs him to see the world as charged with meaning.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The resilience of Quixote the character, I think, speaks to the resilience of the chivalric romance itself. The genre, at its best, links inner and outer realities by suggesting that the only way for a knight to grow in spirit is to test himself in deed, to measure his actions against ideals that at times seem impossible. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The story of <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i>, written in the late 14<sup>th</sup> century,<i> </i>is the exemplar of this type. Though the story is perhaps the most anthologized of all the Arthurian legends, I imagine that most do not have its details close at hand, so allow me to provide a synopsis:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It all begins on New Year’s Eve in the court of King Arthur. The knights are deep into their wine and wassail, in celebration both of the New Year and the Christmas season (Dec 31st is the Seventh Day of Christmas). Before the dinner begins on this particular day of feasting, a large and imposing knight arrives and rides his horse into the hall. The rider and his horse are strange to behold, for they are both bright green in color. The knight holds a wood-cutter’s axe but neither carries a sword nor wears a suit of armor. He is not here to fight. Instead, he offers a challenge: one knight from the round table will get one swing at him, and then, in a year and a day, the Green Knight will return the favor.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">King Arthur rises first to accept the challenge, then Gawain, his nephew, volunteers to take his place, proclaiming that his own unworthiness makes him more expendable than Arthur and so more fit to risk his life in this wager. As Marie Boroff translates it, Gawain holds the axe high and &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Brought it down deftly upon the bare neck,<br />That the shock of the sharp blow shivered the bones<br />And cut the flesh cleanly and clove it in twain,<br />That the blade of bright steel bit into the ground.<br />The head fell to the floor as the axe hewed it off&nbsp;</i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">The unthinkable then occurs: the Green Knight (what’s left of him, anyway) picks up his head calmly and holds it in his hand like a lantern before him. He remounts his horse, “as [if] he had met with no mishap, nor missing were / his head.” The head then speaks to Gawain, telling him to come seek him out in a place called the Green Chapel in one year and a day. The Green Knight rides off, leaving Gawain and the rest of the round table stunned.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Gawain’s quest really begins when he steps forward to offer himself in place of Arthur. It’s an act of self-sacrifice, for one, and also a display of faithfulness—to his uncle and lord and also to his own word, his own promise to hold up his end of the contest. The quest therefore, will test these virtues specifically. As he ventures out to find the Green Knight and face his own death, he will also search within himself to find the true measure of these virtues. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Later the following year, true to his word, he sets out to find the Green Chapel. On Christmas Eve he finds a house and is welcomed by its Lord, in the midst of a Christmas celebration. In the spirit of the season he and the Lord agree to an exchange of gifts: over the course of three days, the Lord will go out hunting and present Gawain with what he kills; Gawain must in return give the Lord whatever he receives at the castle that day. The Lord happens to have a young, lusty wife, who does her best to seduce Gawain. She enters his bedroom scantily clad each morning, wondering aloud how she will pass the time with her husband away all day on the hunt. Gawain resists her advances with the grace of an esteemed knight. Out of courtesy he exchanges kisses with her, which he then gives to the Lord at the end of each day (the Lord smiles and laughs when he receives the kisses). On the last day, Gawain receives from the lady a magical green girdle, which protects the wearer from harm, thinking that it will be useful when he meets the Green Knight. In order to wear it out of the castle, he does not give it to the Lord, thereby breaking his promise.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Armed with his special protection, Gawain finds the Green Chapel on New Year’s Day one year and a day after the Green Knight’s challenge. The knight has just finished sharpening his axe blade, and is ready to return Gawain’s stroke. Gawain bares his neck for the Green Knight, but flinches when the knight raises the axe. The knight chastises him, and Gawain gathers his courage. The knight then feints a blow, to test him, and then Gawain grows angry, and chastises the knight. The third time is for real:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>He gathered up the grim ax and guided it well:<br />Let the barb at the blade’s end brush the bare throat;<br />He hammered down hard, yet harmed him no whit<br />Save a scratch on one side, that severed the skin;<br />The end of the hooked edge entered the flesh,<br />And a little blood lightly leapt to the earth.</i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">Gawain, largely unharmed, sees his own blood spurt onto the white snow, springs up and grabs his weapon, his part of the bargain fulfilled. The Green Knight laughs and explains that he himself was the lord of the castle, and his wife was the one who tempted Gawain. The two feigned blows were a fair exchange, he explains, for the two mornings Gawain kissed his wife; the third cut was for breaking the terms of the bet by not giving the lord the green girdle. The knight explains:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Yet you lacked, sir, a little in loyalty there,<br />Bu the cause was not cunning, nor courtship either,<br />But that you loved your own life; the less, then, to blame.</i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">For this little fault, for not exchanging the girdle in an attempt to preserve his own life, Gawain receives a small cut whose scar, along with the girdle, he will wear as a reminder of his failure on this quest. He returns to Camelot ashamed, but to his surprise Arthur and the knights greet him with joy, and, “with gay laughter and gracious content,” the court decides all of Arthur’s knights shall wear a green girdle for Gawain’s sake.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As I said way back at the beginning of this post, this story hinges on the central Christian paradox of giving up one’s life in order to save it. The Christmas season is where I begin when trying to explain this to my students. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s difficult for a modern reader to fathom just how oriented the medieval worldview was towards the vertical. They were constantly reminded of the Christian mysteries in the feasts on the calendar and the cycles of nature. We have a hard time remembering now that the Christmas season begins, rather than ends, on December 25, and we immediately identify December 31st as New Year’s Eve before we associate it with the Christmas feast. But it is significant that the Green Knight arrives during the twelve-day-long bash of Christmas celebration. He is appropriately dressed for the party in the everlasting color of life—not just green, but “bright green,” the color of spring tubers and new growth. When his head is hacked off the poet makes no mistake to tell us that his blood flowed in perfect Christmas color scheme—“the blood gushed from the body, bright on the green.” This linking of death and new life (of course, the ever-green knight cannot be killed) is precisely why Christmas colors are red and green, for the holiday celebrates the joining of the opposites of life and death. The infant, safe from the cold in a manger where he was warmed by the cow’s breath and his mother’s milk, has come into the world only for the purpose of dying by being fixed with iron nails to the hard wood on a rock outcrop called the skull. Christ the person embraced these opposites for the purpose of defeating them, by showing them to be, through his Resurrection, in the end, unopposed. The Green Knight’s challenge to Gawain serves as an invitation into this mystery, the starting point of a quest that will lead him into some deeper understanding of this paradox.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Gawain does pretty well in his quest until he stumbles on the problem of the girdle. He resists the lady’s advances valiantly, but when she offers him the magical garment on the evening before he sets out to face his death, he can’t refuse. Who could blame him for taking the one thing which was supposed to provide him with immunity from harm?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When one practices a faith which holds up, as an exemplar of love, a lifeless body on a cross, self-preservation is a foundational sin. This does not mean it is not natural. On the contrary, as Darwin made clear, staying alive is the most natural instinct we have. This also does not mean that self-preservation is not understandable. But it does mean that it moves us in the opposite direction from love. Gawain, full of shame after realizing his mistake, speaks of keeping the girdle as a reminder of his error:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>But a sign of excess it shall seem oftentimes<br />When I ride in renown, and remember with shame<br />The faults and the frailty of the flesh perverse<br />How its tenderness entices the foul taint of sin;</i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">How can sin come from “tenderness,” from the instinct we have to protect ourselves and soothe our wounds? Isn’t this an unreasonable definition of sin? Not for a knight whose actions are measured by certain ideals, no matter how lofty or unachievable. By accepting the Green Knight’s challenge, Gawain pledges to pursue the quest to the end, and it is clear that it invites him deeper into the Christian paradox: that it is Christ’s death, and Christ’s death only, that gives us life. For Gawain to experience the bright green of the knight he also must experience the red—he must give up his life, without flinching or protection.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">That is, in order to succeed he must fail in the eyes of the world and human instinct.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>One crucially important detail of the story escapes most modern readers, including myself the first several times I taught it. The final encounter with the Green Knight occurs on January 1st, which is both New Year’s Day and the Eighth Day of Christmas. Up until the 20th century, this day was also celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord—now in the Catholic Church it’s celebrated as the Feast of Mary, Mother of God (which after a little Googling I discovered was what the feast was called in the earliest days of the Roman Church as well). For most of the last millennium, and for the Gawain poet and all of his or her original readers, January 1st would have been associated with the circumcision of Christ, which according to Jewish law, took place eight days after his birth.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this context, Gawain’s slash on the neck takes on new significance. The poet carefully describes the cut as one that “severed the skin” as “the end of the hooked edge entered the flesh, / And a little blood lightly leapt to the earth.” The Green Knight might as well be a moyel. Gawain’s mock beheading is a kind of circumcision, not of the usual organ but closer to what Deuteronomy (and later St. Paul) calls the “circumcision of the heart”: “circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stiff-necked any longer” (Dt 10:16). Gawain will bear his scar as the Jews bore the mark of circumcision as the sign of their covenant. When he arrives at Camelot after his journey, he shows Arthur the girdle, and calls it the “blazon of the blemish that I bear on my neck.” Both the scar and the girdle are reminders of his sin of not being open to love—of having an uncircumcised heart. The sin is small—certainly understandable—but it brings him shame no less.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The contrast between Gawain’s dejection and Arthur’s joy is striking and significant. It speaks, I think, to the inevitability of Gawain’s sin, despite the guilt it brings him. Arthur and his court accept the symbol of the girdle with “gay laughter and gracious intent” and the whole incident folds into the twelve-day-long Christmas feast. Joy, then, is the proper response to Gawain’s (and our) inability to give of ourselves in the way that Christian love demands. Joy is the emotion proper to commemorate the birth of a child who will one day die. Joy is necessary to accompany us, like Gawain, on our quest not just to understand but to enter into the Christian paradox of gaining by giving.<br /><br />I think it's no coincidence that you'll find an unbreakable joy at the heart of the chivalric romance, a joy so strong that even a parody of the genre like <i>Don Quixote</i> turns into a kind of unwitting homage. A quest narrative—that is, a story of going out in order to be transformed within—begins in the hope that the world has something to teach us, and that we are built for its order, not the other way around. <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i>&nbsp;presents this vision better than any romance I know, and can serve as a guidepost for students who are wandering in our modern fog. The world trains them to think that they are built for achievement, whereas in truth, like Gawain, they—we—are built to experience the deeper joy of fulfillment.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-70389498797999534832016-12-19T23:30:00.003-05:002017-04-27T21:41:40.465-04:00Drinking and Storytelling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LXv5OhOtjGM/WFiz3qFDgvI/AAAAAAAABFQ/y4bnK7yH4LAfAtVqbMM9-MC3eP9H7sjBgCLcB/s1600/p0424pb3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LXv5OhOtjGM/WFiz3qFDgvI/AAAAAAAABFQ/y4bnK7yH4LAfAtVqbMM9-MC3eP9H7sjBgCLcB/s320/p0424pb3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Last year for a Christmas present I received a copy of Olivia Laing’s <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trip-Echo-Spring-Writers-Drinking/dp/1250063736" target="_blank">The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking</a></i>. Now that this year’s Christmas vacation is here, I’ve finally found time to read it (aren’t gifted books like wedding thank-you notes? One year to get around to them?). It’s quite good—Laing, a British writer, travels the US on a route that traces the haunts and tortured careers of six American writers of the last century: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway (pictured above), John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. All of these writers also happened to be professional alcoholics, and Laing digs deep to find the roots of their drinking in their pasts, as well as its manifestations in their art. I’m more than halfway through, and so far it’s excellent. Laing's gaze is unflinching, neither glamorizing their drinking nor celebrity status, and in its ability to connect the dots among the six protagonists, the book reminds me of another of my favorite multi-person biographies: Paul Elie’s <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Life-You-Save-May-Your/dp/0374529213" target="_blank">The Life You Save May Be Your Own</a></i>, which presented the interconnected lives of the last century’s most influential American Catholic writers: Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Flannery O’Connor.</div><a name='more'></a><br />I’m coming up for air midway through Laing’s book because a line from John Cheever’s journals resonated with my thinking on the importance of stories and storytelling.<o:p></o:p><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>The tonic or curative force of straightforward narrative is inestimable. We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping. We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose. When I find myself in danger—caught on a stuck ski-lift in a blizzard—I immediately start telling myself stories. I tell myself stories when I am in pain and I expect as I lay dying I will be telling myself a story in a struggle to make some link between the quick and the defunct.</i><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In that last sentence I imagine that Cheever is using “quick” in its archaic sense, meaning “the living.” &nbsp;What he means is that stories, at the end of his days, will be his attempt to connect life and death, this side of the curtain with the darkness beyond. He will have practice in that art from his own youth, which, as he says, received stories as a way to “bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping.” In a separate letter Cheever wrote to a friend, he claimed that he became a fiction writer “to give some fitness and shape to the unhappiness that overtook my family and to contain my own acuteness of feeling.” Storytelling, in his estimation, naturally arises from suffering and the very human need to make sense of our pain. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Cheever’s words here speak to the deep connection between storytelling and faith. Both require a leap from one thing to another (sleeping, waking, living, dying), and function only through some transcendent coherence that is not contained in either of those things but in the relationship between them. The sense of a narrative emerges only when three things are present: beginning, middle, and end. Stories require a jumping from one event to another, from one incident to the next, all the while holding in mind what has come before and what might come after, and leaping off from any one moment into this larger arc to render the moment meaningful.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A decade ago in graduate school I wrote a paper on faith and narrative in <i>King Lear</i> that I delivered at a conference in Ireland. The whole thing was, in part, a scheme to get my school to pay part of my airfare to see my girlfriend (now wife) who was living in London at the time. But write and deliver the paper I did, and looking back on it now, I see it as a real turning point in my thinking about literature, away from the en vogue Deconstructionist critics and towards a humanism more amenable to faith. My whole argument in the paper was that, in <i>Lear</i>, perhaps the bleakest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, characters’ attempts to escape their suffering always involve told fictions. This is especially true in the case of Edgar as he cares for his blind father in the storm. Much like a parent would lie to a small child in a traumatic situation (e.g. "everything will be okay"), Edgar deceives his father about his own identity (he does not tell him he is his son) and their surroundings. I tried to argue that the play shows us that the most natural way to alleviate our suffering is to tell and hear stories, even if they involve outright deceit. Our imaginations are necessary to ease our pain, to live any kind of meaningful life in the face of suffering. As a way to wrap up my point, I drew upon the British scholar Frank Kermode, who, in <i>A Sense of an Ending </i>argued that “it is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for co-existence with it only by our fictive powers.” Cheever would concur.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Laing chases this thread of writing fiction to make sense of pain, and connects it with the theme of her book—the authors’ consumption of copious amounts of hard liquor. (Drinking beer, according to this book, didn’t qualify as real drinking for these writers. Hence Fitzgerald could claim that he hadn’t had a drink in months while guzzling a dozen or more beers a day). Here’s Laing starting to twist the two threads together:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>A sense was building in me that there was a hidden relationship between the two strategies of writing and drinking and that both had to do with a feeling that something precious had gone to pieces, and a desire at once to mend it—to give it fitness and shape, in Cheever’s phrase—and to deny that it was so.</i><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I haven’t finished the book, and I’m interested to see where Laing goes with the idea of writing and drinking as linked responses to suffering. When it comes down to it, aren’t they both attempts to relieve the self of the burden of making meaning? A story, as I tried to explain above, connects isolated incidents in linear sequence, and in this relationship of incidents something a bigger, more meaningful picture emerges. Laing explains how much of these authors’ fiction attempted to work out motifs from their childhoods (e.g. fathers who failed or even committed suicide), and in that sense their storytelling is an necessary endeavor—a way to transport their pain from the confines of memory and place it into a larger chain of events, where, to use Cheever’s words, it could gain “fitness and shape.”&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A character in a story is at the mercy of this larger chain, and thus unburdened of manufacturing his or her own significance. This submission of will to something beyond the self is, in my opinion, the lynchpin of faith and fiction. As I wrote <a href="http://aleteia.org/2015/11/17/in-a-data-driven-world-were-losing-the-narrative/" target="_blank">in an article last year for the Catholic website Aleteia</a>,<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Narrative readies us for inner transformation by demanding that we submit, if only for a time, to being carried along in a larger design. In doing so, it reveals itself to be something like the fabric of the spiritual life. To surrender to Christ is to inhabit his narrative—the most meaningful one, we believe.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As the self disappears in a larger story, the self also disappears in the act of drinking. You don’t have to be a pickle-livered drunk to call to mind the effectiveness of the bottle in easing pain or worries. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Christ’s first miracle on earth was changing water into wine, and good wine, at that. I’ve always heard that Gospel story explained as Christ communicating the joy of eternal life, and rightfully so. It would not contradict that explanation to say that the miracle at the Wedding at Cana shows us Christ’s desire to ease our pain in a very real way, to let the barbs of our mind dissolve into the water of life, whether it be whiskey (<i>usquebaugh)</i>or wine. Come you who are burdened, I can hear him saying, listen to my story. Tell me yours. Have a drink.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-67758615093541834072016-11-29T15:37:00.003-05:002017-04-27T21:40:07.680-04:00Technocrat or Storyteller? On Hillbilly Elegy, Public Schools, and Trump<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ynfDN-lATQ0/WD3m0-tACsI/AAAAAAAABEw/Fv6vdpwQDmQVQxYykEutSIr8TqKHPPXwwCLcB/s1600/27161156.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ynfDN-lATQ0/WD3m0-tACsI/AAAAAAAABEw/Fv6vdpwQDmQVQxYykEutSIr8TqKHPPXwwCLcB/s320/27161156.jpg" width="211" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">During weeks leading up to and after the presidential election, I read J.D. Vance’s much-talked-about memoir, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture/dp/0062300547" target="_blank">Hillbilly Elegy</a></i>. The book had shot to the top of the bestseller lists before the election, and in the wake of Trump’s victory, Vance has been a go-to commentator for an East Coast media desperately searching for someone who understands what makes the rest of the country tick.</div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">I highly recommend the book, especially the last half, where Vance seems to shift from straightforward autobiography into deeper reflection on the identity of Rust Belt America. Here we see the author—who grew up in rural Kentucky and Ohio—getting close to an answer to one of the the book’s biggest questions: What makes Appalachians so resistant to outsiders’ attempts to understand them? Vance explains that it’s because outsiders come armed to that task with the tools of technocracy, which don’t work because hillbilly culture runs much deeper than data:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><i>No single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.</i><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The language spoken by the American ruling class—the technocratic elite—is one driven by statistics. Statistics are necessarily concerned with the measurable aspects of people’s lives—with things like GDP, income, employment rate, educational tests scores, and so on. This is all that public policy makers and Ivy League wonks can ever speak about. It is the language of our national institutions—of our politics, schools, justice system, etc. Yet because it only concerns the outside of people’s lives, this language can never speak to our most human needs. It can never really explain why we do what we do, and it can never fulfill us in the way that our deeper cultural institutions (art, family, religion, etc.) can.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One need look no further than the surprise among most over the Trump victory (including yours truly, though I was not shocked to see a close race). The polls were wrong, the pundits were wrong, every metric was wrong. Especially concerning the Rust Belt. Every statistic in the world couldn’t account for the fact that Vance’s hillbillies felt a special kinship with Trump, that he was speaking to them and tracing their own narrative of disappointment in his speeches. No matter that Trump is one of the richest men in the country, a Manhattan socialite if there ever was one—he was able to connect where it mattered with the kinds of folks Vance writes about. Clinton, the ultimate technocrat, credentialed to the eyeballs and poised to steer the American machine into the far reaches of Progress, failed because she couldn’t tap into the right kinds of narratives. Bernie Sanders did tap into those narratives, and I’m not the only one to think that he would have had a better shot in the Rust Belt against Trump. Huckster though he may be, Trump knows that politicians need to speak to the personal aspects of people’s lives, and they do that by telling stories, and linking their own vision to the common stories of the people. Does this mean that good politicians need to be demagogues like Trump? I don’t think so, though demagoguery is always a potential problem in a democracy, and especially in a democracy in the age of social media. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One thing to take away from this election is that human nature isn’t as malleable as perhaps the progressives had assumed. Or at least not as easily massaged into seats for the ride to the future of Progress. People naturally resist being told what is good for them by a cadre of experts, and can only stand it so long when what those experts are telling them is good doesn’t mesh with what they experience in their communities and in their bank accounts—think of the blue-collar resistance to things like globalization or foreign policy or Obamacare or the push for genderless bathrooms. What does technocracy have to say to people’s gut feelings, or the value of tradition and custom in shaping communities? Nothing. And so, over the past few decades, we’ve had a gap open up between the kinds of things the elite in our country spoke to and what people feel inside and how they live their lives from day to day. Perhaps this gap was hard to notice at first, but it grew increasingly wider, and Trump came along and exploited it to his advantage.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I recently read a book that explains exactly what this looks like, this distance between the technocratic utopia and the way people really live, as it plays out in public school classrooms. The book is called&nbsp;<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Substitute-Going-School-Thousand-Kids/dp/0399160981/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1480451844&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=substitute+baker" target="_blank">Substitute</a></i>, by the writer Nicholson Baker, and in it he recounts his observations during his time working as a substitute teacher in a school district near his home in Maine. Baker is a meticulous observer (the book is very detailed and over 700 pages long), and he paints a vivid picture of a school system that attempts to train the future technocrats of America by filling them with information, teaching them skills, and, above all else, keeping them busy throughout day. In Baker’s school, kids spend most of their day on iPads, flitting from one activity to the next, and most teachers are managers, patrolling the classrooms while helping students with various tasks. Most of these activities have to do with memorizing information, or filling out charts, or analyzing text or data. If kids finish working early, they watch videos on their screens until the bell rings. There’s always a din that threatens to erupt into chaos, and teachers spend most of their days yelling “Guys!” to tilt the balance of noise back to a tolerable level.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are a few moments in the book when a teacher achieves a genuine attention in the classroom, when the students are quiet not because they’ve been yelled at but because they are captivated by what the teacher is doing. Several of these occasions, Baker notes, are when students are read to. He is floored when one particularly difficult grade-school class sits in silent wonder while he reads a Roald Dahl story to them. The whole day he had been desperately trying to get them to pay attention while he ran through a litany of activities with them; now they were rapt. As the book goes on the reader realizes that these moments of engagement with stories are far and few between. Most of the time students are reading gaggy informational texts, some of which are worked into clunky narratives in the style of SAT reading comprehension questions. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Students naturally recoil from this kind of beauty-less education. Baker’s book shows this—they hate the bureaucratic assignments (charts filled out, worksheets pencil-whipped, projects completed and graded according to a rubric) and desperately want to listen to and tell each other stories. This need for stories, in my mind, accounts for all the background noise that teachers are constantly fighting. When students are bored by a skull-numbing worksheet or foolish activity designed to divert their attention from the fact that what they’re doing is not interesting in its own sake, they turn to each other and start gabbing about their own exploits, or someone else’s. In other words, when a teacher does not engage them with stories, they provide their own. We need beauty in order to give us purpose, to stir in and draw forth from us our natural desire to learn, and it is clear that our modern educational technocracy does not provide it. Only a few books, and even fewer works of fiction, are mentioned in Baker’s observations; most involve activities that students can complete without reading the books themselves. On a day-to-day basis, English classes in public schools do not ask students to immerse themselves in a work of literature and discuss it, period. I know—I taught out of a public-school textbook for many years, and teachers have to work against the fragmented nature of the curriculum to clear an activity-free space for the simple act of close reading and discussion of a full work of literature. Think about that for a moment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is what I mean by the disconnect between technocratic goals and people’s lived experience. Humans were not built for this kind of data-driven existence, and the younger ones among us (i.e. Baker’s students) are not as practiced in the art of hiding their frustration as we civilized adults are. So in <i>Substitute</i> we see the friction between a story-less pedagogy (dare I say soul-less?) and the human need for transcendent art; in the recent election we saw the friction between the message sold by the model technocrat and the blue-collar workers (who until very recently were in the pocket of this technocrat’s party) who decided to take their chances with the candidate who spoke to them in stories that they could sink their teeth into.</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">My review of Baker’s book is forthcoming in a Catholic publication; I’ll post the link here when it runs. For more of my thoughts on the issues surrounding technocracy, education, and stories, see my posts on <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/01/why-silicon-valley-and-literature-are.html" target="_blank">Silicon Valley</a>, on <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/01/eros-and-modern-student.html#more" target="_blank">Eros in education</a>, and on the <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-self-as-marketplace.html" target="_blank">difference between Big Data and narrative</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-17044970029978401222016-10-21T14:56:00.000-04:002017-04-27T21:38:20.593-04:00More on St. Midas, Part 2: Three Suggestions for a Return to the Humanities<div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/10/more-on-st-midas-part-1-identifying.html" target="_blank">In Part 1</a> of my follow-up to my <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/st-midas%E2%80%99s-prep" target="_blank">recent article in <i>Commonweal</i></a>, I attempted to explain how Catholic high schools encourage the achievement culture without perhaps realizing it. Online gradebooks, I argued, play a major part in fostering an “education-as-consumption” mindset, in which students are made to understand their classes as opportunities for them to gobble information in order to receive accolades. I think that most Catholic educators would agree that this is not what a Catholic school culture should be. So what should we do?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t think that answers will be found in technical solutions. Adding programs, increasing service-hour requirements, or requiring more professional development won’t help much here. Bureaucracy itself contributes to the problem, so it cannot be a conduit for the solution. Instead, I’d argue that what we really need is a return to and a reinvigoration of the Humanities.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Like its relatives the “Liberal Arts” or the “Great Books,” the “Humanities” means different things to different people. What I mean to suggest by the term is the study of human nature, usually accomplished by a guided tour through Literature, History, Philosophy, and Theology that has as its goal an ongoing conversation about the soul (or self, if you prefer) and its relation to the world. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I realize that literally “returning to the Humanities” is impractical for most schools, if not impossible. Very few colleges have a coordinated Humanities curriculum, and even fewer high schools do. So I suppose what I really mean is a return to the spirit of the Humanities, a return to the study of subjects for their own sake. A Catholic school, I think, should be a place where students should get the sense that whatever they’re studying, whether Biology or History or Doctrine, they are doing so because it helps them understand themselves and their relationship to the world. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What would this vision actually look like? It is a nice thing to wish for, and easy enough to say. Most school mission statements already say it, or something similar. But how would a school go about making it happen? That is, how would this spirit of the Humanities manifest itself in classrooms? I have three concrete suggestions:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>1) Expose students to great art</b><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Beauty comes before expediency. Literature textbooks need to go, and be replaced by actual books. Anthologies of poetry; novels, plays, etc. If a student is not moved by what he reads he will automatically treat it as so much information to be learned, and the game is lost before it has had a chance to begin. Students know this intuitively, I think. For several years I required my students to purchase a paperback copy of Dante’s <i>Inferno</i> rather than read the small selection in our World Literature textbook. Reading through all 34 cantos with them was difficult, no doubt, but there was a palpable difference in their demeanor when they were holding the real thing rather than looking at a chopped-up snippet in the arranged-for-them textbook. That difference, I think, was respect—respect for what Dante had created and for what they were called to do in reading his work. Without beauty there is no Eros, and without Eros there is nothing beyond the self, and without anything beyond the self we are in the territory of St. Midas. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2014/09/contra-textbooks.html" target="_blank">See my post on textbooks and Catholic schools</a> for more in this line of thinking.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>2) Put the reins on online gradebooks</b><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">I covered this topic in my first follow-up to the article, so I won’t try to argue the point again. I know that online gradebooks are very difficult to avoid, especially in large schools strapped for resources. They are convenient, efficient, and transparent. But the downsides outweigh the benefits, and I think there is a way to mitigate the effect of their poison, even in large schools with high student-teacher ratios. They key would be to eliminate the 24/7 fluidity of the grades. Rather than have teachers uploading grades every week or two (and at all times in between), it would be more effective to set dates for grade releases, when the online spreadsheets would be sent out to parents/students, much like paper progress reports were in the days before the internet. Perhaps this would happen twice a marking period, definitely no more than three times. But the hope is that it would help re-direct the students’ focus from the symbols of their achievement (grades) to the actual subject matter of their study, from what they consume to what they are called to be consumed by.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It would be necessary, of course, to have a system in place that would notify parents more speedily when their child is struggling, rather than waiting a month for the grades to be released. But this is good practice anyway, and is the kind of communication that teachers/schools need to make space for when they make their personnel and workload decisions.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>3) Encourage teachers to be masters of their subjects</b><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps the most important suggestion I can make is that teachers need to be great. Trite, I know. But they do. And I think that while no one would advocate for bad teachers, or incompetent teachers, the trend in education over the last few decades has been to de-emphasize the importance of the teacher’s knowledge. Teachers are told to avoid being the “sage on the stage” and are encouraged instead to be the “guide on the side,” facilitating student progress and taking a less-central role in the classroom.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I know where this advice is coming from, and it’s responding to real problems—teachers who drone on and on without any real awareness of the yawning gap between what they’re saying and the interest of those in the seats; teachers whose classes are really about them showing off how much they know. Both of these are situations that are destructive to a classroom environment.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Yet in the attempt to avoid being a “sage on the stage” bigger problems often arise. Classes tend toward strings of activities and group work—anything to keep them occupied!—which discourages deep thought and contemplation. Teachers tend to be good managers but not necessarily scholars. And, just like with the issue of literature textbooks, beauty is lost. Students are not moved by a good manager. Students are moved by witnessing a master of a subject, and are drawn to those teachers who seem themselves to be eternal students, always curious, never tiring of discovering. If a teacher sidesteps his students’ questions about Shakespeare because he either does not know the answer or where to direct them, students get the message that Shakespeare really isn’t worth asking too many questions about. Again, beauty is key. By teaching well, teachers do something beautiful in their very attempt to reveal the beauty of the world to their students. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Why is there such a disconnect between the expectations for a college professor and those for a high school teacher? Issues with the “publish or perish” culture aside, a college professor is expected to have a deep knowledge of her field, and to be able to create her own syllabus and figure out her own method for giving notes and discussing readings, etc. Her mastery of her subject matter is paramount, and all of her academic preparation for teaching (i.e. a Ph.D program) is content-driven. But if you talk about pedagogical preparation for teachers of students just a few years younger, almost all of it is process-driven (i.e. how to assess, how to manage a class, different learning styles, etc.) Why? Are students suddenly inspired by different things when they pack up and go to college? Is a teacher’s knowledge of her subject area not relevant if her students happen to be under 18? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why not require, instead of education degrees, that high school teachers have at least a bachelor’s degree in the subject they’re going to teach?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I realize that my tendency in these kinds of prescriptive posts is to stay abstract and make very broad suggestions, and hopefully those I have given here have been more concrete. Overall, I would argue that the best way to combat the St. Midas phenomenon is to do everything we can to help our students to see the object of their study as worthy in itself, and ultimately, that study is an enterprise they undertake for the sake of understanding their own place in the bigger world. That is, we must help our students see the world with eyes of wonder.<o:p></o:p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-67273664491074931832016-10-03T13:10:00.000-04:002017-04-27T21:38:20.612-04:00More on St. Midas, Part 1: Identifying the Problem<div class="MsoNormal">­­­­Thanks to <i>Commonweal </i>for running <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/st-midas%E2%80%99s-prep" target="_blank">my piece on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Catholic schools</a>. It's online now and is forthcoming in their print magazine. It’s been a while since I wrote the article, and in revisiting it in recent weeks, I realized that I have quite a bit more to say on the topic of the achievement culture and Catholic Ed.</div><a name='more'></a> <o:p></o:p><br /><div class="MsoNormal">For starters, see my <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/08/what-is-education-for-william.html" target="_blank">recent post in response to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep</a>. I mentioned Deresiewicz’s book in the article, and he addresses many of the same issues I’m concerned with in relation to the culture surrounding elite universities, especially the Ivy League.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t think that the issues I brought up in the article are ones that necessarily stem from the affluence of a school community. Sure, Fitzgerald’s St. Midas School is an exaggeration of his experience at an exclusive prep school, but we have to remember that this is F. Scott we’re talking about. American wealth and its adherents were to him what sharp angles and distended figures were to Picasso: they were his medium. The problem he presents in the examples of the ultra-rich Braddock Washington and St. Midas is not so much one of having too much money as it is one of having the wrong attitude towards the world. The prevailing evil spirit in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is one that attempts to render the gift of the world into symbols that may be put to use for one’s own intentions. The diamond inside the Washington family’s mountain is not something they want to preserve for its natural beauty but rather for its value as a piece of exchange for their salvation. In other words, they repurpose it as an arbitrary sign that may be used for whatever they need. The world exists for them.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In my opinion the problem with modern education is a similar one. In the end, any school must take one of two directions: Are students meant to think that their school is a machine that allows them to acquire skills and information that they can exchange at a later date for security, status, etc.? Or are its students meant to think that school should be an entry into something larger than themselves, into things like art, the workings of nature, and the big questions of life? The issues I wrote about in my article are addressed, I would argue, by working to make the culture of Catholic schools resemble the latter vision.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Let me say more about what I mean by the first approach—school as the machine that chops the world up and shovels it down students’ gullets. Though I held up Fitzgerald’s caricature of an ultra-rich Catholic boarding school as an omen for us today, I didn’t actually have modern Catholic boarding schools in mind when I wrote the article. Instead, in talking about the presence of the meritocracy in Catholic Ed, I was drawing from my experience of large-enrollment, parochial, tuition-driven schools. Because these schools have fewer resources, classes tend to be large (somewhere in the range of 25 students). It varies from school to school, but it’s not unusual to see more teachers with undergraduate degrees in education rather than in their subject areas. Because they cannot rely on an endowment, these schools have to survive by making themselves attractive to the current market and thus tend to be followers, rather than leaders, in educational practice (of course they have to make themselves sound like leaders in their marketing, but not so much so that they appear to be trying something unfamiliar). Textbooks for English and History classes are frequently the same ones used in public schools, and, in terms of curricula, these kinds of parochial schools look identical to public ones, save for Theology class.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What happens—and as I mentioned in my article, this is the fault of the system, not of nefarious individuals—is that under this model, Catholic high school risks becoming a place for students simply to learn facts and perform well in order to achieve good marks so that they can go on to a good college and get good jobs when they graduate. All of these are good things, of course. Students should have to learn lots of information in high school, and they should try to get good grades and go to the best college that they can. But if their school asks nothing more from them in their academic experience, their education becomes a matter of consuming symbols (facts, grades, plaudits) for their own use. They learn that the world exists for them.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Online gradebooks exacerbate this problem more than any other one factor, in my experience. I’m talking about the kind that are visible to teachers, students, parents, and administrators, and that teachers are usually asked to update frequently (each week or two). There is a logic to them, of course. Open gradebooks aim at keeping parents in the loop so Junior can’t hide the fact that he hasn’t done his homework in weeks; they also are an attempt to keep teachers accountable so that they can’t fudge grades at the end of the quarter because they spent the whole time watching movies and only gave one quiz. But it’s important to keep in mind that the online gradebook is a mechanical solution to problems that arise when the relationships among students, teachers, parents, and administrators falter. And it’s much easier for these relationships to falter when class sizes are large and teachers can’t pay adequate attention to each student’s progress. The quickest way to turn a profit is to increase your student:teacher ratio, and large class sizes are inevitable in a school that does not have the luxury of relying upon an endowment. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Inevitable though they may be, I would argue that online gradebooks are inimical to the spirit of the humanities, and to any hope of fostering the sense of wonder in our students. What happens when grades dominate is that a student’s experience in any given class becomes a matter of getting an average up and keeping it there. Where the “there” is depends on the student. Some, in my experience, are only happy with top grades. Others aren’t as motivated, but their parents are. And still others are happy with Bs or Cs or even simply passing marks. With open gradebooks, maintaining a certain mark becomes a matter of calculated effort. Does a student have a B going into a final exam, but would be happy with a B- for the year? All she has to do is figure out how much the exam is weighted, and then only study as hard as she needs to in order to earn the grade on the exam that will give her the B- overall. Perhaps that would be a C or even a C-. It’s a bit like playing Fantasy Football. No one is really interested in who wins the game—just if your starting lineup earns more points than the other guy’s in a given week.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Fantasy Football doesn’t claim to be real football, though. The kind of educational experience I’ve been talking about does often claim to be Catholic. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If we want to have students think that their study is made for them, then the school environment I’ve described above is a good model, perhaps with a few kinks to work out here and there for the sake of efficiency and propriety. But it’s clear from the cross that Christians are called to give themselves to the world, and from the teachings of Christ that we are to become like children in our relation to it, standing in awe at the wonders of creation. That is, Catholic students should be made to realize that they were made for study, not the other way around.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">How do we do that? More to come in Part 2.<o:p></o:p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-35760547229810682852016-09-21T11:23:00.004-04:002017-04-27T21:40:07.669-04:00Andrew Sullivan on the Distracted Life in New York MagazineI apologize for the sparse blogging as of late. I've started teaching at a new school, and the start of the school year, combined with learning the ins-and-outs of my new community, has filled up my mental space. I hope to have more time to think and write as all of these new things settle into a routine, which is already starting to happen.<br /><br />While I have a minute, though, I wanted to draw attention to <a href="http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killed-me.html" target="_blank">Andrew Sullivan's article in the most recent issue of <i>New York Magazine</i></a>. Sullivan, you might know, is among the most prominent cultural writers of our time. He was one of the first public figures to push for same-sex marriage. His blog was at the forefront of the push of the 24/7 cycle of news-and-commentary, and his influence is enormous.<br /><br />Sullivan stopped blogging last year, and in his article he writes about his recovery from addiction to the information cloud. I won't recap the article here, but a few things struck me:<br /><br />First, we can add Sullivan to the list of prominent writers who are leading the discussion about the harms of 24/7 access to information, along with Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, etc. These are folks who are arguing that personal technology is not only changing how we understand the world but how we understand ourselves as human beings. I tend to agree with them, of course, and think that our future depends on figures of their generation (30-and-older) speaking out now about what is happening. We have the privilege of remembering what I've heard called "an analog past"--a time when our thoughts were not directed towards the digital stream, when there was no alternative to being present where you were, when peace and rest and leisure seemed to come a little easier than it does now. My current students do not have this memory--as they grow older, smartphones and wifi will be to them what television is to most of us living now: something always there, as fixed in the universe as rock ledge.<br /><br />It is easier for those with a memory of an analog existence to fall prey to technological cynicism and visions of the apocalypse, for sure. But those who have experienced life without the cloud are the only ones who are able to remember what the cloud obscures, what was lost. We are living on what we could call a "seam" of history, where the direction of society takes a drastic shift, and while we are on that seam we can see that direction as a direction, and not as the background scenery. To know something for what it really is, as Eliot said, is to know it "for the first time." We are there now, and writers like Sullivan, who do the work of preserving that vision of technological havoc while it is still fresh, are not unlike Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and the other Romantics, who witnessed what kind of transcendent vision was being lost in industrialization, and tried to preserve it in their art.<br /><br />My second observation is that Sullivan's article is more proof that the current state of affairs moves intellectuals into two camps: those who follow the god of information and those who admit that there is a soul. Is human experience ultimately material or transcendent? There is no in-between, and one benefit of the rapid acceleration of personal technology is that it forces the hand of thinkers who otherwise wouldn't be caught talking positively about things like religion to admit that the world does have meaning. Consider Sullivan, a fallen-away Catholic who is publicly at odds with the Church, who in his article writes about the importance of monasteries and of creating a space in our routines, such as "weekly Mass...that lets your life breathe." Religion, Catholicism especially, might be the only cultural institution left that has a chance of surviving the information age with its identity intact, because its practices cultivate stillness rather than restlessness, silence rather than noise, being consumed by rather than consuming.<br /><br />Sullivan, who should know better than anyone else the effects of 24/7 connection to the information stream, writes at the end of his essay that "the threat is to our souls." Strong words from a man who has chosen them carefully. I urge you to read his essay.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-57046967914353290412016-08-19T20:58:00.004-04:002017-04-27T21:44:28.475-04:00Further Thoughts on David Denby's Lit UpIn <i>America</i>&nbsp;<i>Magazine</i>'s most recent issue you'll find <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/culture/saved-book" target="_blank">my review of David Denby's <i>Lit Up</i></a>.&nbsp; Some additional thoughts—on&nbsp;Denby's project, and teaching while Catholic—that I didn't have room to fit in the piece:<br /><a name='more'></a><b></b><br /><b>What about the other two schools?</b><br />One key element of the book that I downplayed in the review was the fact that Denby spent time at three schools observing English classes, not just Beacon in Manhattan. One was a public school in the wealthy suburb of Mamaroneck, NY, the other an inner-city school in New Haven called Hillhouse. Denby's original plan for the book was to immerse himself in Leon's class at Beacon only; however, given that Beacon was a selective school that drew the best students from New York City, Denby decided to cast a wider net, hence the trips to Mamaroneck and Hillhouse. Yet to my mind his coverage of these schools seemed gratuitous, a half-hearted gesture at obtaining a more representative research field. Case in point: just three of the book's fifteen chapters are devoted to Mamaroneck and Hillhouse; the remaining dozen all concern Beacon and Sean Leon's class.<br /><br />In omitting these other schools in my review, however, I wasn't able to mention Jessica Zelenski, the teacher whose classroom Denby visits in New Haven. Her student population poses what seems like an insurmountable challenge. Students arrive in class, it seems, either boisterous or lost in their headphones; when she asks how many of her twenty-three students live with their father, only five raise their hands. How to get these kids, preoccupied by so much, to pay attention to what she is saying about some old book, never mind to go home and actually read it and write about it? But Zelenski,, "brass-lunged," is up for the task. As Denby writes, "Her operating method was less about maintaining order than about grabbing the students' attention and making them engage...she mixed it up with the students, demanding answers, chaffing, taunting, and then offering praise."<br /><br />I know exactly the situation Zelenski finds herself in, because I've been in it, too. You almost have to out-energize the students, and get the loudest, most boisterous student in the room to pay attention to you by being louder and more intense than he or she is (and, let's face it, it's usually a he). I know of no more exhausting work that I have ever done, but also no more rewarding work, if you are able to succeed. Zelenski does.<br /><br /><b>Catholic and Teaching English</b><br />Zelenski is a single mother, and, as Denby reports it, a practicing Catholic. Sean Leon, the heroic teacher at Beacon, is a lapsed Catholic. As I was reading this book, it dawned on me that there is a real connection between the Catholic worldview and the things that drive a passionate teacher of literature. Both views acknowledge the importance of our being moved or changed or even converted by what is outside of us. Both views stress being engaged in the present, of giving what is before us our full attention. Both views emphasize openness to the lives of others.<br /><br />I would say that this connection between Catholicism and teaching literature will only become more apparent as public schools become more technocratic and data-driven in their pedagogy. English class might be the only place left in a public school where a teacher can, by the very act of teaching her content area, help shape students' souls. I don't mean to say that other teachers can't change their students' lives, because they do, in profound ways. But as an English teacher you have, every day, an opportunity to read and discuss with students plays, poems, novels, etc. that call upon them to change the way they live. And it's not surprising to me that an English teacher who is driven by this possibility, who is motivated to get her students to being open to being transformed by what they read, would also have some connection to the Catholic faith. The two views<span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>Catholic and literary<span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">—</span>share similar DNA. As English class become more information- and skills-driven, I think that the standout teachers<span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">—the ones like Leon and Zelenski who buck the system and insist that students are consumed by, not consumers of, what they read</span><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">—will be the ones driven by some broader religious-like vision, or at least colored by it, as Leon has been.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Literature makes demands on us, demands that are spiritual and moral in nature, and call us not only to compassion but to self-examination. The standard English class, subject to required testing, shot through with the technocratic goals of the Common Core, and reliant upon mass-market textbooks, seems to do everything possible to sanitize literature, to prevent these demands from having any purchase on students. Leon and Zelenski succeed by refusing to let that sanitizing happen. Kudos to Denby for highlighting them.</span><br /><br /><br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-24604974492299129652016-08-17T11:09:00.003-04:002017-04-27T21:39:02.815-04:00What is Education for? William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep and the Religious Tradition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMYf5RlYcQE/V7R-D5r_diI/AAAAAAAABDE/fMVefTi3Zmsb0bxeswoDk7ihAyUPqXEdACLcB/s1600/41zKSAir7mL._SX326_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMYf5RlYcQE/V7R-D5r_diI/AAAAAAAABDE/fMVefTi3Zmsb0bxeswoDk7ihAyUPqXEdACLcB/s320/41zKSAir7mL._SX326_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Catholic school’s role in perpetuating our American meritocracy. It’s been an underlying theme of this whole blog, and I wrote about it most directly last year in a <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/05/st-midas-prep-f-scott-fitzgerald.html" target="_blank">post on F.Scott Fitzgerald’s experience in a Catholic prep school</a>. That post has since developed into a more polished article that should run in the near future in a Catholic periodical.</div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">One of the leading voices on this whole phenomenon (not in regard to Catholic schools but to education in general) has been William Deresiewicz. For several years I’ve used his outstanding 2010 essay <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/" target="_blank">“Solitude and Leadership”</a> for fodder for classroom discussion. Recently, I made my way through his 2014 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Excellent-Sheep-Miseducation-American-Meaningful/dp/1476702721" target="_blank"><i>Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,</i></a> a jeremiad against an Ivy League culture (Yale especially) that, in his view, grooms graduates to be self-congratulating overachievers with very little sense of purpose.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A jeremiad the book is indeed, and were it not for the fact that Deresiewicz is largely correct in identifying the issues that plague elite education, I would have put this book down within a few chapters. His tone is unbelievably cynical, and he comes across as an uncharitable scold. At his worst points, such as in the chapter entitled “Inventing Your Life,” his writing resembles something like a high-school student’s in its shallow grandiosity, flitting from claim to claim, his paragraphs propelled by clichéd directives. Consider the following proclamations, taken from just five successive paragraph over two pages: “Deciding to invent your life is not the answer…Give yourself time…waste is not waste…You’re going to be a very different person in two or three years…Inventing your life is not about becoming an artist or activist or entrepreneur or any other particular thing…” and so on. Gaggy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Deresiewicz also seems to lack a sense of who his target audience is here. The real issues, he claims, lie not with students but with the institutions themselves and, more broadly, with a larger culture that perpetuates the existence of an insular elite technocracy. Much of the book is directed towards that larger culture, but several chapters seem more tailored for current teenagers, and read like a made-for-Twitter commencement speech, albeit one whose message is entirely antithetical to most such speeches.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">For all of these foibles, though, Deresiewicz is spot-on in identifying what I’ve come to understand as the fundamental disease of modern education, which is that it proceeds from the assumption that the world exists for us, rather than the other way around. Schools now, in their official administrative communication as well as their marketing, seem to suggest that the purpose of education is to improve students’ standing in society, so that when they are done with their time in school others may look upon what they have accomplished and say, “well done.” In other words, the world exists for you, not the other way around.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This view assumes a symbolic relationship between students and their objects of study. The goal of an education, in this understanding, is not to be changed by what you learn but instead is to acquire tokens that can be cashed in or exchanged for something later—prestige, job security, salary, respect, etc. These tokens can be many things, such as grades, awards, test scores, etc, and the mad drive to acquire them Deresiewicz appropriately calls “credentialism.” It’s a kind of consumerism, really: we are defined by what we can make visible to others, by the pile of stuff that we can list for all to see, and that, we hope, will boost our reputation and ensure a “successful” life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Lost in all of this is education’s commitment to transforming the self, to things like virtue, character, and questions of purpose. This commitment, Deresiewicz concedes, was mostly abandoned somewhere in higher ed’s sinuous history, the key date for him being 1964, when admissions-policy changes at Yale marked the beginning of the end of the WASP aristocracy. Deresiewicz by no means wants to return to the good ‘ol boy days; in fact, much of the book bemoans the fact that the current commitment to student diversity in fact is superficial, and colleges are just as homogenous, in terms of social class, as in the old days. He acknowledges, though, that something important was lost in the transition from aristocracy to meritocracy, and that somehow we’ve managed to get rid of the best parts of education while retaining the worst, that the baby has been thrown out of the window and the dirty bathwater is still sloshing in the tub. Places like Yale and Harvard still pick from a narrow pool of elite students; the only difference is that now once those select young men and women get there, their education no longer has a center, a guiding vision that allows their various classes and majors to cohere.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Deresiewicz is not religious, but in his desire to explain education’s purpose he keeps bumping up against the spiritual. He speaks directly of students finding their vocation, that one thing that, in coming to understand themselves, they discover that they are called to do. He argues for re-grounding education in the humanities, and in doing so finds himself constantly apologizing for using terms that have religious overtones. Consider the following passages:&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>I’ve been using the word </i>soul<i>, and though I’m not religious, I find that only a religious language has sufficient gravity to do these questions justice. For we are speaking of the most important thing: no less a thing than how to live.</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>I’ve found that religious students are often the ones who possess the greatest degree of moral autonomy.</i><i>&nbsp;</i><i>Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one’s ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect </i>[addressing the questions of “meaning and purpose”]</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Belief, for many reasons, is unavailable to Deresiewicz, and, I imagine, to most of those teaching in the elite schools about which he’s writing. Perhaps there is no profession in America less inclined to orthodox religious practice than English professors, especially those employed by secular universities. Reasons for this phenomenon are much too complicated for me attempt to address here, but I’ll simply take that premise as foundational as any statement one could make about the world. In tracing the genealogy of the humanities, Deresiewicz rightly identifies 19<sup>th</sup>-and early-20<sup>th</sup>-century aestheticism as the connection between the historically religious goals of education with the wilderness of solipsism in which we now find ourselves. Allow me to quote at length:&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>The humanities are what we have, in a secular society, instead of religion…As traditional beliefs were broken down…the arts emerged as the place where educated people went to contemplate those questions of meaning and value and purpose…Instead of looking in the Bible, you read Dostoevsky, or listened to Beethoven, or went to see an Ibsen play. Libraries, museums, and theaters became the new churches…The arrangement became known as aestheticism, the religion of art. “The priest departs,” said Whitman, “the divine literature comes.” </i>A Portrait of the Artist <i>dramatizes this precise transition. Instead of joining the Catholic clergy, where he would have had the power to enact the transubstantiation </i>[I don’t think that “enact” is the right word to use here, theologically speaking, but we’ll forgive Deresiewicz]<i> Stephen chooses to devote himself to performing the miracle of literature, “transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life”—that is, into the imperishable stuff of art</i>.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>It is no coincidence that English became an object of university study around the very same time aestheticism crystallized as an idea. The center of the college curriculum slowly swung from the Greek and Latin classics, taught by rote as fixed bodies of knowledge, to English and the other humanities</i>.<i>..The change was actually a form of continuity. Most colleges had been founded as church-affiliated institutions; now they sought to carry on their spiritual mission under the secular dispensation. Beside the specialized programs of study in the scientific and other disciplines that were also introduced in the late nineteenth century (majors, in other words), there emerged the humanistic components of the liberal arts curriculum, including the “Great Books” and other “general education” courses that were designed to provide an opportunity for students to reflect upon “the big questions.” The minister in the college chapel, preaching doctrine, gave way to the professor in the classroom, leading a discussion.</i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">So, according to his trajectory, as the religious faiths that gave birth to universities (Harvard and Yale were originally religious schools, after all) ceased to have cultural purchase in the post-Enlightenment era, institutions sought to retain what was valuable about their heritage—i.e. the focus on the big questions—while sloughing off the doctrinal baggage. The result was aestheticism, the transcendence of art, preserved in the subjects that constitute the Humanities. But in doing so, in compartmentalizing science and history and philosophy and literature, in allowing students to pick and choose majors, it grew less and less evident that the goal of an education was to transform students, or, more simply, to form them. The goal of college began to resemble what it looks like today—a place to acquire information to put to use for one’s own purposes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So what about those institutions for which religious faith is not an untenable proposition but a living reality? Here is where secular criticism of the meritocracy (coming from folks like Deresiewicz, Mark Edmundson, and David Brooks) should spur Catholic schools to reclaim some of their own territory when it comes to the Liberal Arts. Many Catholic colleges still require students to take core credits in subjects like English, Theology, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, but how many schools provide a meaningful framework for these requirements, orienting them around the big questions?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In other words, in most Catholic schools an incoming freshman—let’s say a Finance major—will see that he has to take so many courses in these core subjects, perhaps two in each. But that’s where the requirements stop, in most places. Usually that student will be able to pick and choose whatever interests him to fulfill those requirements. Considering most offerings in these subjects, that might be highly specialized courses: one semester, he might take Intro to English and US History before 1850; the next he might choose something with a sexy title like Philosophy of the Body and something rather ho-hum like Old Testament Wisdom Literature. Now, if the student comes from a high school where he’s gotten a good understanding of European History or Ancient Philosophy, these courses might be able to speak to each other; he might be able to draw out some similar themes, or understand that they involve the same essential questions. Given such a foundation, the student might have a sense of what it is that he wants to learn, what ideas he’d like to explore more fully in their various iterations in each discipline. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But let’s face it. Students like that are rare because teachers who would impart such a desire to know are rare and high schools that would provide such an intellectual background are rarer still. And so most students at Catholic colleges hop from core class to core class until they’re through the requirements and go on to study something that will really be of use to them, in their eyes, and will really help them get ahead in the world. And, in most Catholic colleges, students graduate with no discernible distinction from their counterparts at secular schools, except that at their school they had to take two Theology courses and they had to walk past the chapel on their way to and from Macroeconomics.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I was fortunate that my school, Providence College, was (and still is) a flag-bearing institution in terms of its curriculum. Every student, over the course of their Freshman and Sophomore years, has to take four semesters of Western Civilization (Civ, for short), in total a 20-credit team-taught sequence that starts in the Fertile Crescent and plows through to the 20<sup>th</sup>-century. Though not a perfect curriculum (what is?) it gave me a base from which to launch all of my subsequent study (grad school in English and teaching literature to high schoolers). More importantly, it helped me understand that the purpose of the Humanities, of studying cultures and their art, is to help us know ourselves. That is, to guide us in our search for answers to the two essential questions: Why are we here? and What should we do about it? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ll never forget reading <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> near the end of this two-year journey, and the thrill of starting to make sense, on my own, of the novel’s wide reach, the depth and breadth of the questions Dostoevsky raised. It was all coming together.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On top of Western Civ, PC required, if I remember correctly, six credits in each of the following subjects: Literature, Science, Social Science, Math, Philosophy, and Theology. So there was very little room to double-major in things like Economics and Finance. But for me, it was worth it. Those other Humanities requirements, with the backdrop of Civ, gained a resonance that they would not have otherwise. The same thinkers and movements kept popping up (Aristotle, Aquinas, Freud, Marxism, Darwinism, Romanticism, etc) and—perhaps this is the mark of a good school—the disciplines seemed less like islands in the roiling sea of academia and more like neighborhoods in the same city.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">At the end of his book, Deresiewicz offers some suggestions for overcoming the “Hereditary Meritocracy,” such as devoting a higher percentage of tax dollars to higher education, basing Affirmative Action on class instead of race, and other policy changes. However, with the exception of a few generic suggestions to help professors teach well (reducing class size and de-incentivizing research), he has little to offer in the way of large-scale suggestions for re-grounding the undergraduate experience in virtue, character, and purpose. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps this is because orienting education around these ideals necessarily means wading into the territory of the spirit. What does the modern academy have to say about something that it long ago deemed off-limits? Grounding education in these essential questions is not a matter of applying one isolated discipline (Religious Studies) to another (Literature) but in seeing the whole project of education as having one goal and, essentially, comprising one thing: a unity in which the study of beauty (aestheticism) plays but one part. A commitment to aestheticism as the highest good, which is all Deresiewicz can offer, can only take one so far, for it prevents art from speaking to the deepest, most common human desires. (Perhaps we would all do well, myself included, by looking at what Cardinal Newman has to say about all of this. He wrote directly about these issues, not coincidentally, at the same time that aestheticism begin its ascent in the 19<sup>th</sup> century).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It has never been clearer to me that there are only two ways to understand education. One relegates the world to the service of the individual will; the other relegates the individual will to the service of the world. In the first, study is a means to self-aggrandizement; in the second study is done for its own sake, and, if done with the right attitude, has the effect of transforming the individual. There is no in-between, really. It’s becoming clearer to me that without an idea of anything that is larger and more powerful than individual desire (i.e. our current cultural milieu), education will necessarily take the first form. And the only places where an education in the second definition will survive are those places grounded in religious belief, or something very much like it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m convinced that the only thing worthy of being called an education must follow the second path. So is Deresiewicz. He writes that we are called to look at things in their full particularity, “in itself and for itself—not in reference to you, as an instrument of your desire. But it isn’t just things; we also tend to treat each other as extensions of ourselves. Art forces you to do the opposite.” Art—aestheticism—is a good place to start when thinking about reinvigorating the humanities. But unless art, and the questions it raises, are open to the full spectrum, to our most fundamental human desires, we shouldn’t be surprised when the Humanities are a hard sell to the future leaders of America. Catholic schools are not so limited, and let’s hope they can take the cue (for who else will?) to reinvigorate their curricula with coherence.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-57948664224599299512016-07-21T13:49:00.003-04:002017-05-07T20:31:20.526-04:00Townie and The Confessions<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lgEHdbNrFlg/V5EKzRhfZyI/AAAAAAAABCg/fzrCJ8ynXUAzFE-Dg9lDEJsWQr9Rjj79gCLcB/s1600/cover_townie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lgEHdbNrFlg/V5EKzRhfZyI/AAAAAAAABCg/fzrCJ8ynXUAzFE-Dg9lDEJsWQr9Rjj79gCLcB/s200/cover_townie.jpg" width="131" /></a><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O-LKtP4uKao/V5EKzQGGTBI/AAAAAAAABCk/n2uC-pJC-TYMzBueL69-JGDhUKLf1caYwCLcB/s1600/StAugustineConfessions.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O-LKtP4uKao/V5EKzQGGTBI/AAAAAAAABCk/n2uC-pJC-TYMzBueL69-JGDhUKLf1caYwCLcB/s200/StAugustineConfessions.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br />The year after he became Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine set out to write <i>The</i> <i>Confessions</i>, an account of his sinful past and conversion to Christianity. His story is familiar to many and chronicles behavior that we would not typically associate with a saint. By his telling, he passed his adolescence in a fog of lust, eventually fathering a child and taking up with various concubines well into adulthood. For a while he was a member of the heretical Manichean sect. Only after a long and gradual conversion did Augustine turn from his ways, and he was officially received into the Church at age 32. Soon he became a priest, then bishop, and, thanks to his great influence and spiritual writing, a Doctor of the Church.<br /><br />Clearly, Augustine’s journey was one that passed from bad to good, from sin to redemption, from darkness to light. Why, then, after his conversion, would he look backwards to his waywardness in writing <i>The Confessions</i>? Now that he had put on new garments, so to speak, in his conversion, why would he want to focus on the soiled ones? What was to gain?<br /><a name='more'></a><br />These questions frame <i>The Confessions</i>, one of the most influential works ever written, spiritual or no. And because they frame what is considered the West’s first autobiography, they also frame its modern-day literary successor: the memoir. And because I was reading <i>The Confessions</i> in preparation for a teaching assignment in the fall, these questions were buzzing in my head a few weeks ago as I left the coffee shop where I had been reading and wandered over to a used book store in an adjacent strip mall. On one of the shelves I recognized an author’s name: Andre Dubus, a highly regarded but little-known short-story writer to whom I had been introduced <a href="http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/a-fathers-story-an-elegy-for-andre-dubus.html" target="_blank">by the writing of Nick Ripatrazone</a>, a big Dubus booster. I’ve only read a handful of his stories, my favorite so far being “<a href="https://www2.bc.edu/john-g-boylan/files/fathersstory.pdf" target="_blank">A Father’s Story</a>,” but I liked what I read and was eager for more.<br /><br />The book I spotted, however, was not by Dubus but by his son, Andre Dubus III, and was called, simply, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Townie-Memoir-Andre-Dubus-III/dp/B00AZ9FUA6" target="_blank">Townie: A Memoir.</a> Dubus III is<i> </i>perhaps best-known for his best-selling novel <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393338118/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1944687542&amp;pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&amp;pf_rd_t=201&amp;pf_rd_i=B00AZ9FUA6&amp;pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_r=E3WYWMG0MS107BVC0AKG" target="_blank">The House of Sand and Fog</a></i>, which was made into a major movie in the early 2000s. <i>Townie</i> chronicles the younger Dubus’ impoverished upbringing in towns and cities along the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts in the 1960s and 70s. One would think that the child (and namesake) of an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad who had a good teaching job would not have faced growing up in poverty, but the elder Dubus was several times married, and he left his first wife and their four children, largely, to fend for themselves.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In <i>Townie</i>,<i> </i>Dubus the younger, the second of those four children, describes, in great detail, a childhood spent in cities like Haverhill and Newburyport, once-robust industrial towns whose urban centers, by his time, had deteriorated into dens of abject poverty, violence, and all kinds of abuse: drug, alcohol, and sexual. Dubus grew up, by his account, surrounded by violence. In the book there always seems to be a fight somewhere, whether in the halls at school, on the street, or in Dubus’ own home. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The violence takes its toll on the young Dubus. This is not necessarily because he was on the receiving end of it (though he often was), but because, when confronted by it, he locks up in panic, and cannot fight back, though he wants to. After being around a fight he feels worthless, such as on the occasion when he sees his younger brother Jeb get beaten up on the family’s front stoop. Dubus knows he should help him but he stands frozen, speechless as his brother gets pummeled. In anguish Dubus runs inside, and stares into the mirror, almost in disbelief that a real person looks back at him, for he feels like he does not exist: “There was the non-feeling that I had no body, that I had no name, no past and no future, that I simply was <i>not</i>. I was not here.” Determined not to be a prisoner of his own fears, determined to be able to protect himself and his family, he makes a vow to the boy in the mirror: “I will never allow you not to fight back ever again.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This pivotal moment occurs in Dubus’ early adolescence, and sets him on the path toward bodybuilding, brawling, and boxing. He trains night and day, and as his body grows harder he gains confidence. He fights often, and he fights well. He begins throwing the first punch, and frequently beats his opponent senseless. His trajectory is a stark one: over the course of just a few years, Dubus goes from a frightened teenager to a young man who relishes violence, who daydreams about smashing his enemies’ teeth in, and who, on several occasions, nearly beats people to death.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">From what he reports Dubus rarely bullied others or picked fights, but only intervened when justice demanded it. Still, he starts to notice that he needed to fight, that it satisfied some deep urge within him, and this disturbs him. He stops boxing, let up on the street fighting, and turns to other outlets, especially writing. After many years and a revelatory dream, Dubus, as an adult, finally puts his violent ways behind him.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Like Augustine, Dubus has a conversion of sorts (his is not explicitly religious, but more on that later) and writes from the point of view of the “changed” self who has repented of his wicked ways. And like Augustine, in writing an autobiographical work he deliberately turns his gaze backwards, into the darkness from which he has emerged. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But to what end?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What is there to gain by revisiting a dark, even scandalous portion of one’s life? Christians could phrase the question more pointedly: what can the telling of sin teach us? Certainly Catholics can point to the sacrament of Confession as proof that there is value in voicing our transgressions, but can the same be said for telling the story of our sins to an impressionable audience of many (one’s readers) rather than to a priest in the privacy of a booth? This issue is not lost on Augustine. Early in <i>The Confessions</i>, he bemoans the Greek myths he read in school because they introduced him to vices, yet he then proceeds, of course, to describe his own licentiousness and waywardness. Isn’t he doing to his readers the exact thing he blamed his classroom reading for doing to him?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In Book II Augustine offers something of an answer to this conundrum, and in doing so, gives the <i>raison d’etre</i> of what we might call the spiritual memoir:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>…to whom am I telling this story? Not to you, my God; rather in your presence I am relating these events to my own kin, the human race, however few of them may chance upon these writings of mine. And why? So that whoever reads them may reflect with me on the depths from which we must cry to you.</i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">In Augustine’s understanding, there is nowhere where we can go, nothing that we can do, that can ever separate us entirely from God’s love. Where can we go, he asks, “but from you in your tranquility to you in your anger?” God is beyond harming, so our sin doesn’t hurt him, it hurts us. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” Augustine famously writes in the book’s opening paragraph, and therefore each bout of restlessness, each sin signifies an unfilled wholeness by pointing to our deep desire to be at rest in God.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Come down, that you may ascend, ascend even to God,” Augustine boldly declares, offering advice to those who would draw others to God: “This is what you must tell them, to move them to tears in this valley of weeping, and by this means carry them off with you to God.” And this is what Augustine does in his book—he brings his readers down with him, into his dark past, in order to bring them up. In this sense he is not unlike Dante, who, at the start of the<i> Divine Comedy</i>, sees the mountain of ascent (Purgatory) and wants to climb it but is driven by beasts back into the wilderness from which he hast just emerged, where he meets Virgil, who takes him into Hell. In order to get to get to Heaven, Dante must first understand what the wilderness of sin has to teach him. In other words, Dante must learn how sin points to God. He cannot ascend without first descending, by venturing into his own darkness until he can stand in it without fear, and recognize that even there he is not alien to the “Love that moves the sun and other stars.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Note that Augustine and Dante aren’t suggesting that we are drawn closer to God when we sin, but that our sins can help us understand our relationship to Him by indicating what it is we lack that can only be made whole in Him. Each sin is a distortion of some good. In his lustful adolescence, Augustine thought only of “loving and being loved,” in search of a deeper, more complete love. His time as a Manichee, however heretical the sect, he later understood as a stopping point on his search for a deeper truth. Each sin, for Augustine, is an intersection where one of the crossing roads always leads to God, and each sin therefore presents the sinner with an aspect of divine love, albeit concealed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Andre Dubus III has written <i>Townie</i> from a similar perspective. The book does not hide much in the way of details, especially when it comes to violence: flesh and fists collide, bones are jarred, teeth swallowed, fighters awash in each other’s blood. He goes fairly easy on the sex, except perhaps for one scene. Vulgar language abounds. Yet in these details we see the seeds of the love which will eventually lead Dubus out of his darkness and into a greater communion with others and the world around him.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These seeds are perhaps most visible in Dubus’ depiction of the psychology of fighting. He describes a “membrane around someone’s eyes and nose and mouth, how you have to smash through it which means you have to smash through your own first.” It’s an odd way, to be sure, to describe the mentality of a fighter, and overtly sexual in its imagery. Yet it’s apt language to describe a soul breaking of out the isolation of fear. We are built to be united with others, and the desire for this union guides Dubus’ story, manifesting itself in many different aspects of his life. He longs for a real connection with his absent father, with his brother and sisters, with the bodybuilders he sees in magazines, with the broken individuals he encounters as a social worker. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">For a teen on the streets of Haverhill, MA in the 1970s, the first step into that communion was a swung fist. As he stood in front of that mirror as an undersized nobody, Dubus experienced the nothingness of isolation. He hated how tougher kids would look through him, as if he wasn’t even there. And he knew, intuitively, that to be whole he needed to connect with other people in a real way, to be seen by them, to cease to be invisible. And so he resolves to fight back, and in doing so discovers that he must break through two membranes, two isolating barriers (that of the self and that of the other) for fist and flesh to connect. Noses are broken. Blood gushes forth. Teeth are swallowed. But the membranes have been rent. The movement toward communion has begun.<br /><br />What am I suggesting? That the lonely and fear-stricken should turn to violence to encounter God? Or that every street-tough is a saint in disguise? Of course not. But just as Augustine, in his later years, looked back and saw a greater love in his lust, so too Dubus traces a deeper desire in his violence. In his “breaking of the membrane” is the germ of a real union with others, of a compassion that would lead Dubus to social work, to writing, and, eventually back to his own father.<br /><br />The book opens with a teenage Dubus trying to keep up with his father on an eleven-mile run. Though he is not a runner and is wearing his sister’s sneakers, he refuses to give up and pushes himself past whatever physical limits he thought he had. By the end he is gasping and heaving for breath, his throat parched, his feet cracked and bleeding in the too-small shoes, but, drinking warm park-fountain water by his father’s side, he “couldn’t remember ever feeling so good.” This longing for a bond with his father—specifically, for his father’s affection—drives the story, and later we learn that the desire is mutual. Upon hearing of his son’s street-fighting escapades the elder Dubus, who up until then had never been in a fight, himself starts altercations while out drinking with his son.<br /><br />In 1986 Dubus’ father stopped to help a pair of stranded motorists and was struck by a passing car. One of the people he stopped to help was killed, and the writer was injured badly. He broke thirty-four bones, and eventually lost a leg. The once-fit runner was confined to a wheelchair for the last decade of his life. Dubus the son, now writing and working as a bartender, is tasked with taking care of his father. He shaves him, bathes him, cleans out his bedpan. In these tasks, however, rather than disgust, Dubus finds joy, and he is confused: “how could there be any human room here for joy at all?” But it is joy nonetheless, and Dubus starts to see it in other places, too. Shortly after the accident, his father’s third wife gives birth to a baby girl, and Dubus is there, along with his weak, wheelchair-bound father, and feels, to his surprise (for he is not a religious man) “that something other than just us and our daily stumbling and striving may be here after all.” Dubus may have first broken the membrane of isolation with violence, but it has led to the kind of tender compassion we see in these scenes near the end of his father’s life. It has led, in hisown words, to “a love soul large my body could not hold it all,” and caused him to “[begin] to believe in the soul.”<br /><br />Though his father was in a wheelchair for the last years of his life, he was not an invalid, and his death from cardiac arrest comes suddenly. The closing scene from the book takes place at a funeral service for the elder writer. Dubus’ father was, despite his failings, an attendee at the daily morning Mass at his local parish, and remained deeply religious throughout his life. The final vignette from <i>Townie</i> is a beautiful meditation—Dubus the son stands at his father’s grave while the priest leads those present in the Our Father. He hears a car roar by on the adjacent road, its occupants cursing at the mourners for fun, and his rage rises up in him again, as if it were 1975 and he were cruising downtown Haverhill eager to put up his fists. As the words of the prayer pass through his lips his mind travels back to those episodes from his youth, from the darkness of his past, and finally come to rest with the final phrase: “But deliver us from evil.” It’s a fitting and artful way to end a book that, in rooting into the sin of the past, discovers, perhaps unexpectedly, deliverance there as well.<br /><i><br /></i><i>Townie </i>is not for everyone. There is a lot of violence, a bit more than Dubus needs to achieve his purpose, in my opinion. But that purpose is still there, and it’s what gives the book its strength. Dubus writes about the realities of his youth in greater detail than Augustine did his, but their goal is the same—to show that there is a bigger story at work in our lives, a presence that all along has been drawing us out of ourselves and into deeper relationships—with others, with the world, and with our Father. That presence works in darkness as well as light, in the depths as well as the peaks, though perhaps we can only see its effects once we have emerged from the wilderness to find the straight and true. Only then can we write about it, which Dubus has done so well in <i>Townie</i>.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-52951344396973373022016-06-27T21:54:00.000-04:002017-04-27T21:42:32.842-04:00Gregor Samsa as Grotesque (LMM #2)<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yVpasrPohEY/V3HYrz_cNYI/AAAAAAAABCA/LufZ7apGP68W7OUs-xcvze1Tef82SUSHgCLcB/s1600/1a2d9555ec149db9f9097b6e50ecfb4f.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yVpasrPohEY/V3HYrz_cNYI/AAAAAAAABCA/LufZ7apGP68W7OUs-xcvze1Tef82SUSHgCLcB/s320/1a2d9555ec149db9f9097b6e50ecfb4f.jpg" width="218" /></a></div><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">(For more on the "Literature for the Modern Mind" series, see <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/02/literature-for-modern-mind-introduction.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)<br /><br />Franz Kafka’s <i>The Metamorphosis</i>begins with one of the most famous lines in all of twentieth-century literature: “When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.” Depending on the translation, Gregor is sometimes transformed into a “monstrous vermin,” but the import is the same. An unprecedented change has occurred, something very much like a dream, but very real.</div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">When students start to read this story about the giant bug-man, I usually see two reactions. First, the science-fiction fans perk up, and start to make comparisons to films (<i>The Fly</i>, <i>Alien</i>, etc) where they have seen similar transformations. Other students check out, clearly not interested in getting invested in some strange book about a giant cockroach. In high school, I would have been among the latter group. Why read weird sci-fi when regular human life gives us plenty to think about?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The key to getting your mind around Gregor and his metamorphosis, I tell my students, is to understand that his is not a science-fiction story. Kafka does not explain how the transformation happened, or under what conditions or for what reason. In fact the change does not happen in the story at all, but <i>before</i> the story begins, presumably while Gregor sleeps. We never see Gregor’s appendages mutate into “numerous legs, pitifully thin,” nor his torso change into the hard, rounded shell of the bug. It has already occurred. While a science-fiction story would spend more time on the nuts-and-bolts of the transformation, Kafka’s story pays no attention to it at all; it is that thing which brings the story into existence in the first place.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If not science-fiction, then, what kind of a dimension are we in? Kafka was a practitioner of the grotesque, a style that has its roots in medieval times, and whose literary lineage can be traced from pre-modern theater through such varied writers as Dante, Hawthorne, Poe, and Flannery O’Connor. Though the grotesque is on one level one artistic style among many, it also a way of comprehending the world, a lens that looks through everyday appearances to something the artist believes is more real, to the true nature of things. Grotesque art often draws our attention through its morbid distortions, and exaggerates something already present in human life to such a degree that the audience cannot ignore it. This distortion hinges on our recognition of it, and therefore the grotesque occupies the ground between familiar and unfamiliar—it takes something we recognize and stretches it towards unrecognizability so that it appears strange, but not other.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The manner of the grotesque, then, depends upon what the audience is able to process. This was an important reality for Flannery O’Connor to consider as she wrote her short fiction. She considered her modern readers to be effectively blind to spiritual matters, and concluded that her job was, therefore, to “draw large and startling figures” for them. Gregor Samsa, in all his bug-ness, I’d argue, is about as large and startling a figure as you will find in modern literature. But what is he a distortion of? What familiar reality has Kafka stretched into strangeness so that we cannot avert our eyes any longer?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I have heard many hypotheses for what the bug-Gregor embodies, what reality his insect form brings to the surface. Many critics stress Kafka’s difficult relationship with his own father as a source for Gregor’s estrangement from Mr. Kafka—the latter, a failed businessman, from the start of the story has no interaction with Gregor that is not a physical struggle; in fact, he inflicts the wound that eventually does Gregor in. Others refer to Kafka’s experience as a Jew to explain his motive for creating an estranged creature.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Both of these theories have substantial merit, I think. For my purposes here, though, I want to focus on another one—Gregor’s relationship to modernity, that is, to the period, early in the last century, that ushered the mechanization of industry into nearly every aspect of domestic life. <i>The Metamorphosis</i> was written in 1915, at the vanguard of these changes, when the world seemed to be spinning, as everything from travel to communication to the production and distribution of goods accelerated at a rate unmatched in the rest of human history. After Gregor wakes up, his first thought is “What’s happened to me?” but he quickly turns to other, more practical concerns. He wants to go back to bed to put an end to “all this foolishness,” then spends a good deal of time thinking about how terrible his job is. Gregor bemoans the train schedules, the meals, hotels, and, above all, the fact that his work provides him with no lasting human relationships. He feels overworked, isolated—not like a human being at all.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s important here what Gregor doesn’t think about—the fact that he is a gigantic bug. His thoughts never return to “What happened to me?” for there are more pressing matters to which to attend, namely, work. He sees that he has slept through his alarm and has missed his train, and starts to panic about being late for his job. He frets about someone from work coming to rouse him, and sure enough, it happens—his manager arrives, cane in hand, and demands that Gregor explain himself. It’s a scene out of a nightmare. The most unnatural thing in Gregor’s life isn’t that he’s changed into a bug—it’s that he tries to live and work in the gear-teeth of the modern world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Kafka himself worked as a traveling insurance salesman and experienced Gregor’s line of work first-hand. (Interestingly, he never tells us directly what Gregor sells, but he does refer to the “fabric swatches” on the table by his bed, so perhaps it’s something domestic, like drapery or clothing or upholstery.) And yet, disorienting as that life perhaps was for Kafka, he felt the need to distort it through the grotesque in order to bring out its true colors, to reveal its dehumanizing effect on the individual, and the destruction of the life of the family. The Samsas are a miserable, ineffectual lot, and it’s significant that the one person who has the power to force the initial situation to its crisis (Gregor is locked in his room and no one yet knows that he’s a bug) is the office manager. When Gregor emerges, the manager flees, the father chases him back into his room, hissing at his son, and the mother faints into the breakfast dishes, which come crashing to the floor. The harmony of the home, if it ever had existed, shatters along with the dishes, it seems.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As the story spirals to its necessary conclusion, the bonds that unite the family come undone. There’s a good argument that the title refers not to the change of Gregor from human to bug (which never actually occurs in the story itself) but to the transformation of his family members from those who act like humans into those who act like bugs, especially Grete, Gregor’s beloved sister. Her treatment of him devolves from awareness of and concern for his needs to tolerance for his existence to disdain (she calls him “it” by the end of the story). At the story’s end, after Gregor curls up and dies, the Samsa family, no longer burdened by their hideous son, leaves the apartment and find hope in the thought that Grete, young and beautiful, is in a position to marry a good, successful husband, and restore to the family some respectability. They are happy the embarrassment of Gregor is behind them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t want to turn Kafka into a moralist here and make him out to be some propaganda artist who used a fantastical story to teach his readers the lesson that modern life ruins families. There’s much more going on in this story than that (and even if we could reduce the story to a “moral,” I don’t think it would be so straightforward). Yet one can sense an urgency, even despair here, and recognize in Gregor’s story a darker version of Wordsworth’s lament that “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” or Hopkins’ “All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.” These poets' sentiments are primarily about how industry, by separating us from nature, also separates us from ourselves; Kafka’s follows something more insidious—modern industry, by changing our daily habits and routines, absorbs us into itself, away from each other, and we grow isolated to the point that we, like Gregor, choose death over life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The challenge for Kafka was to make this come to life for an audience for whom, even as early as 1915, modern life had become regular, something that one rarely thought about any more than we, today, might think about the existence of the internet (it is just there, as the walls and roof of our houses are there). More difficult was the fact that Kafka was trying to draw our attention to the quality of modern life, which is&nbsp;something invisible, and all good art must present itself in the world of the senses. He chose the grotesque as his medium, and he must have made a good decision, for his short novella, over a century after its publication, stands as prominently as any work of fiction in Western literature. I imagine that some of that has to do with the preposterousness of Gregor’s figure and the dark humor of the Samsa’s story. They are hard to ignore, which was his goal.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-90181472041375547392016-05-23T12:47:00.000-04:002017-04-27T21:38:20.618-04:00Classical Education and the Catholic School<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xToCt21MKA8/V0Mz8g5LWiI/AAAAAAAABBo/edRnq9bEZ-AEUkk2LVSsoJaNaI5kcgM2gCLcB/s1600/Well-Trained%2BMind.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xToCt21MKA8/V0Mz8g5LWiI/AAAAAAAABBo/edRnq9bEZ-AEUkk2LVSsoJaNaI5kcgM2gCLcB/s320/Well-Trained%2BMind.JPG" width="211" /></a></div><div><br /></div>I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about classical education. Our oldest daughter is set to start kindergarten in the fall, and the rationale behind the trajectory of our modern educational system—what we teach our children, how, and when—suddenly seems much more relevant to me. My foray into teaching 8th grade this past year (a new level for our high school) has also piqued my interest in the purpose of the lower grades—how, for example, the structure of elementary and middle school points toward high school, college, and adulthood. My wife went to a classical high school, so I was already somewhat familiar with its basic principles.<br /><a name='more'></a><div><br /></div><div>The two resources I’ve found most useful are Dorothy Sayers’ essay <a href="http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html" target="_blank">“The Lost Tools of Learning”</a> and the much more comprehensive <a href="http://www.welltrainedmind.com/" target="_blank"><i>The Well-Trained Mind</i></a> by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (pictured above; the link should take you to the book's website). The latter is geared toward homeschoolers and contains lots of details about the particulars of applying the classical model to the homeschool setting, but its outline and explanation of the classical Trivium are worth the price of admission.</div><div><br /></div><div>Briefly, the classical model is divided into seven traditional “liberal arts” that progress, in two stages, from the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) and to the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy). The Quadrivium served as specialized learning in its time (the origins of classical education stretch back to Ancient Greece) and its four subjects, while not unimportant, certainly carry less relevance in our age than the fundamental Trivium, which seeks not to teach specific skills about a certain subject, but rather—and this is what Sayers implies in the title of her essay—the “tools” that will help a student learn for life.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Grammar stage of the Trivium corresponds, loosely, with the elementary grades (no coincidence that they were not long ago referred to as “grammar” school). This stage of learning emphasizes rote knowledge, as it works with the sponge-like quality of a young child’s mind and their enthusiasm for learning new things. The <i>Well-Trained Mind</i> suggests that this is the best time to guide children, in their eagerness, to foundational content—those pieces of information that will become, as they grow, the touchstones of their world: historical epochs, biological classifications, geography, Latin, spelling and grammar, etc. Memorization has gone out of fashion in our current educational system, but the idea behind its emphasis in the classical model is that students will begin to recognize what they’ve memorized all around them—in the news, books, etc—and culture will constantly reinforce the relevance of this information outside of school.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Logic stage occurs during the middle-school years. The student, armed in the grammar stage with lots of important information, now starts to understand how it all fits together. “Why?” is the question that guides the Logic curriculum. Students learn relationships between things, and get a firmer understanding of the wholes that give sensibility to the parts they’ve learned in the younger grades. Really—and my experience teaching high school bears this out—the middle-school grades are the beginning of understanding. They are the time in a child’s life when inquisitiveness comes naturally, and if that questioning spirit is not massaged and encouraged during the short window of early adolescence, it is very hard to resuscitate in the later high school years. If inquisitiveness does not animate a student’s mind, apathy quickly takes up residence, and no matter what a teacher does, learning will never be anything to that student but pieces of information to be gathered, begrudgingly, and released to achieve a satisfactory grade.</div><div><br /></div><div>Rhetoric is the final stage in the Trivium and corresponds with high school, especially the upper grades. In this stage students begin to find their voices, and start to participate in the great world of ideas that they have been studying. Appropriately, the capstone of these years is the thesis, which a student writes and successfully defends as a requirement for graduation. Most schools have a remnant of this in a junior- or senior-year argumentative research paper that is a prerequisite for matriculation. Like the earlier two stages, this last one taps into the natural strengths of students at that period of their development. What more does a 16- or 17-year-old want to do but express himself or herself? This is the time of life where teenagers self-style: do they want to be seen as hipsters or athletes? Runway models or intellectuals? This desire for self-expression is one of the reasons that teens flock to social media—it gives them a space to craft their own image and project it to the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Rhetoric stage channels this natural desire into the expression of ideas, and helps a student speak his or her mind in an effective way. The study of rhetoric itself as a subject is often part of this stage. Students are also exposed to great writing and great writers—they not only get an overview of the history of ideas but ideally during this stage they would be directly introduced to the work of the world’s most influential thinkers (what high school History classes, for example, now often call “primary sources,” as if they were novelties added onto the curriculum rather than the basis for the curriculum itself). Student writing, which was primarily concerned with summary during the grammar stage, and synthesis during the logic stage, now moves into argument, which, if done well, utilizes summary and synthesis in the service of persuasion. What contribution will students make to the world of ideas? The rhetoric stage helps them discover what they have to say, and helps them say it well.</div><div><br /></div><div>It probably goes without saying that each stage is not isolated in focus. That is, the Grammar stage does not “drill and kill” with memorization activities at the expense of inquiry or expression, nor does the Rhetoric stage eschew the teaching of important dates or terms in order to focus entirely on persuasive training. Rather, the names of the three stages indicate the emphasis of each, the overarching purpose that corresponds with the natural tendencies of children at their various levels of development. I find such a clear trajectory refreshing in an age when a K-12 education, from a bird’s-eye, looks like an archipelago of grade levels and subjects that has been strafed, rather uniformly, with buoyant terms like “skill building” and “critical thinking.” Knowledge-as-information largely reigns. Perhaps it is the legacy of John Dewey or maybe it stretches back even further, but, in simple terms, the modern school offers no coherent vision of how everything fits together.</div><div><br /></div><div>For all intensive purposes, an authentically classical education is almost unworkable in our age, outside of homeschools and small institutions whose students largely come from like-minded families. The entire classical sequence, from the early grammar years on through upper rhetoric, contains too many interconnected levels for someone to just open up a classical high school and take all comers. Unless students come from families with feverish reading habits and have gained a working knowledge of Western history, hopping into the classical system in 9th grade won’t really work. Furthermore, classical schools require small classes and teachers schooled in the classical tradition, and the typical large Catholic high school (at least here in the Northeast) is simply not set up for such an operation.</div><div><br /></div><div>That’s not to say that Catholic schools have nothing to learn from the classical model. In fact, its unity of focus is of great value to a faith that professes that all truth is one. A classical education takes for granted that children are drawn to the beauty of the world around them. This manifests itself first as a desire to soak up the world in wonder, to take in everything they can. Children don’t need to be taught to learn; they need to be pointed in the right direction—toward something beautiful—and their natural instincts take over. Language acquisition happens this way, at a very young age, and I’d argue that all learning follows suit, especially in the early grades. Given the right conditions, children need to be steered, not pushed, in the direction educators want them to go.</div><div><br /></div><div>The classical model proceeds from desire, which is something I’ve written about recently in my posts on modern education (<a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-interminable-practice-fable.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/01/eros-and-modern-student.html" target="_blank">here</a>). If all learning is but acquiring information, as the modern view would have it, how can we expect students to desire it? We can’t: we must turn learning into a symbol for something else—a successful career, money, prestige, character, etc—and thus convince them that as they build their knowledge of the world around them what they’re really doing is building a better future for themselves. True enough, but it should be no surprise when students turn into automatons, concerned only with earning good grades, since grades are the only thing that has any intrinsic value. In the Trivium, acquiring information is less important than understanding, and the impulse to understand is assumed to be built into students, something that emerges as they enter into a more mature relationship with the world around them. Desire follows beauty, and the beauty of the world seems to me to be the one thing that bestows unity, and thus sense, to the three stages of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.</div><div><br /></div><div>It would be impractical, if not impossible, for most Catholic schools to do much with the classical system structurally, for the reasons I mentioned above. Yet our faith also takes for granted the inherent sensibility of the world—the logos—and its goodness. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as Hopkins put it, and in such a world the appropriate response is wonder. The broad principles of the Trivium can guide us in channeling our students’ wonder in order to develop individuals who know much, think deeply, and communicate well.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-60716836672851317202016-03-30T13:23:00.000-04:002017-04-27T21:42:32.847-04:00The Inferno and Incarnational Art (LMM #1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dH7XOzf413U/VvwJMZfivZI/AAAAAAAABAs/MsuNoOcnyS4aJL9Ao965PKccFgATmKzCA/s1600/dore-divine-comedy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dH7XOzf413U/VvwJMZfivZI/AAAAAAAABAs/MsuNoOcnyS4aJL9Ao965PKccFgATmKzCA/s320/dore-divine-comedy.jpg" width="262" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To kick off my series on “Literature for the Modern Mind,” I’ll start with the one who started it all—Dante Alighieri. Really, I should address his whole <i>Commedia</i> here, but since I’ve taught the <i>Inferno</i> for the past three years in my senior class, and (I’m ashamed to admit!) I haven’t yet read the <i>Purgatorio</i> and <i>Paradiso</i> (both this summer, I hope!) I’ll stick to the first of the three-part journey.</div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">For more on what kinds of literature I hope to write about in this series, <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/02/literature-for-modern-mind-introduction.html" target="_blank">see my earlier post on the modern self.</a> I want to examine some works that I’ve read and taught that put forth a concept of our identity that runs counter to the modern one. By a modern identity I mean one predicated on the notion that the body and mind have little to say to each other, that the physical and spiritual exist on separate planes and interact only through a series of representations or extrapolations. Standing against this world view is the kind of art we might call <i>incarnational</i>, in the broad sense that it seeks to express the spirit through matter, through <i>carne, </i>the flesh. <i>Incarnation</i> is obviously an important word for Catholics (and all Christians), as it expresses a doctrine central to the faith, namely, that Christ, God-made-human, took on flesh in order to express love through its wounds. This whole process wasn’t a symbol, or metaphor, but the real thing, love itself, known as only we can know it—through the human form.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Flannery O’Connor once famously said at a dinner party that if the Eucharist “[is] a symbol, to Hell with it!” One might also apply that saying to the kind of literature I’m trying to define (and of which O’Connor wrote her fair share). In it there are really no things such as symbols, for if we think about characters primarily through gestures and talismans that “symbolize” their real identities, we have already divided the world into the two realms of body and spirit. Rather, <i>incarnational</i>literature seeks to collapse this kind of divided vision by presenting, I would argue, the eternal through the physical.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This all sounds rather vague, so let’s let Dante show us the way (guided by Virgil, of course).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I often spend an entire class focusing on the first nine lines of the <i>Inferno</i>. Dante’s famous opening sets the stage for a journey into the wilderness of the self, one that will end happily but only after he faces directly the darkness that lies within him, and within us all. I use the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Inferno-Modern-Library-Classics-Dante/dp/0812970063" target="_blank">Anthony Esolen Modern Library translation</a>&nbsp;with my students, which is perfect for them—very readable, footnoted only when absolutely necessary, and supported by Esolen’s excellent commentaries on Dante’s medieval perspective, which Esolen, to a large extent, shares (and I mean that as a compliment, by the way). His translation begins:&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Midway upon the journey of our life<br />I found myself in a dark wilderness,<br />for I had wandered from the straight and true.</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>How hard a thing it is to tell about,<br />that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,<br />even to think of it renews my fear!</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>It is so bitter, death is hardly more—<br />but to reveal the good that came to me,<br />I shall relate the other things I saw.</i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Right away we realize that we are in a kind of in-between reality. The wilderness is not simply a physical wilderness, a hard-to-travel, heavily wooded area, but a spiritual one as well. Dante hasn’t just lost the footpath, but the “straight and true.” Dante emerges from the wilderness early on in the first canto, but is prevented from journeying towards the light (the sun, but also God’s truth) by three beasts, which likewise occupy a space between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit. The she-wolf which crosses his path is not merely a wolf but one “whose scrawniness seemed stuffed / with all men’s cravings, stuffed with desires.” Spirit and flesh are indistinguishable in this world. You cannot have the she-wolf without also having “all men’s cravings,” nor the cravings without the she-wolf. They are one and the same. The beasts turn Dante back into the same wilderness from which he just emerged, and his guided journey into the wilderness of sin begins.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Students often ask me if the <i>Commedia</i> is “true.” In other words, did Dante “really” visit Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and by “really” they mean “in the physical sense.” Such a question must be asked, of course, if students hope to begin having their worldview transformed by Dante’s art, but the best response is perhaps to say that it is “true” if we understand “true” as Dante did. For Dante, the most real world is not simply physical but one that has been made more clear by the workings of the poetic imagination. The most accurate depiction of a landscape is not given to us by a camera but by a poet or a painter. The imagination is the access point to truth, and in Dante’s relating of his journey into the wilderness of Hell, and later, the mountain of Purgatory and circles of Paradise, he is in fact showing us the real truth of human action, in all its dimensions.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To the modern mind the imagination is at best an individual’s ripcord, a way to escape from reality, and at worst a vehicle for delusion, a way to avoid reconciling one’s mind to the hard realities of fact. But to the Catholic artist, like to the Greco-Roman poet or Native American storyteller, the imagination is the one thing necessary to tell a “true” story. Imagination, in this view, does not isolate us but unites us with the real world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Dante’s goal, in the <i>Commedia</i>, is to present the eternal dimension of human action—that is, to show us how our habits shape our souls. In a way, this is quintessential Aristotle. Virtue (<i>arête</i>) is a habit: we are what we repeatedly do.<i> </i>Someone who constantly thinks about ways to get more money is in fact the definition of a greedy person; someone who consistently visits shut-ins is a charitable person, etc. The idea is not new. Dante’s great contribution here is that he presents that eternal dimension as a good artist must—through vividly physical descriptions, the world accessible to us through the five senses. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As we travel through the different circles of Hell, we see the identities that individuals have created through their sins, identities invisible in the world of time and space but made real in Dante’s poetic journey. A few of my favorites: </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the fourth circle the greedy roll huge boulders at each other, jeering, unable to stop for fear of getting crushed by a stone rolled by someone else. They are appropriately “dim[med] beyond all recognition now,” for they sought to be distinguished in their earthly lives. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the second level of the seventh circle the souls of suicide victims are condemned to inhabit gnarled trees, whose fruit is plucked by birds. At the Resurrection of the Dead, they will be the only souls in Hell not reunited with their bodies, for in their self-inflicted deaths they have slung them off. Instead, their bodies will be draped over their branches like laundry on clotheslines. The sounds of their voices is horrific to describe:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>As when you light one end of a green log,<br />the air inside that forces its way out<br />will squeak and sputter at the other end,</i></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>So from the splintered limb came forth at once<br />both blood and speech…</i></blockquote><div><div class="MsoNormal">Dante has great pity for them, and promises to do what he can to restore the good name of one of the suicide victims, Pier della Vigna, when he returns to the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are many more memorable descriptions of what sins have done to individuals. Hypocrites, so concerned with presenting good appearances, are weighed down by gilded cloaks of lead. Simonists, who have committed the sin of selling Church offices for profit (think of Chaucer’s Pardoner), are stuck, head-down and drowning, in baptismal fonts. Fortune-tellers have their heads twisted around and walk forward while looking backwards, weeping tears that run into their ass cracks. And so on. All these descriptions are governed by the notion of <i>contrapasso,</i> Dante’s “divine justice”—the idea that the punishment is appropriate to the crime committed, often in an ironic sense.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I could go on, but I’ll wrap up by reiterating the idea that there are no real “symbols” in Dante’s universe. That is, the boulder-rolling that the greedy participate in does not <i>symbolize</i>their desire for money—it <i>is</i> their greed itself, in its eternal dimension. This is what they were really doing, every minute of their lives, as their habits formed their identities. They have come to desire this action—they can’t stop rolling boulders because they don’t want to, and that’s the real horror of their sin. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I have to keep reminding my students that the “eternal” is not the same as the “infinite.” Eternity lies outside of time, and thus this Hell that Dante describes is not the afterlife in the sense that it occurs chronologically after the souls have died. It occurs outside of time and space, and therefore contains all of it. What Dante witnesses are the sinners’ lives themselves, from the vantage point of eternity. In his art, Dante has to make that invisible dimension visible, and so must funnel it through the world accessible to us in our senses. Thus, it appears distorted, stretched, and bent, but not beyond what we are able to recognize.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal">This making visible the invisible is what I mean by calling Dante’s art, and all Catholic art, <i>incarnational</i>. It is an attempt to give flesh to that reality which is the source of all flesh but not contained within it. It straddles the border between the familiar and the strange, and doing so directs us on a journey that, like the poet's himself, moves outward and inward at the same time.</div><br /></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-19959242793970679352016-03-18T23:23:00.004-04:002017-04-27T21:41:40.431-04:00Giraldi Article in Dappled Things (and some links)The "Candlemas 2016" edition of the Catholic literary journal <em>Dappled Things</em> features an <a href="http://dappledthings.org/9303/catholic-novelist-confused-apologist-william-giraldi-and-the-nature-of-religious-fiction/" target="_blank">article I wrote</a> on the novelist William Giraldi and his relationship to the Catholic literary tradition. The article is a loose response to Giraldi's own essay on being called a "Catholic novelist," which ran in the <em>New Republic </em>last summer. Some relevant links are below.<br /><br />Thanks to <em>Dappled Things</em>, and please check out their journal. They do great work in nourishing those of us who read, think, and write about the intersection of art and faith.<br /><br />Further reading:<br /><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/122078/confessions-catholic-novelist" target="_blank">Giraldi's essay "Confessions of a Catholic Novelist"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2014/julaug/redefining-religious-fiction.html?paging=off" target="_blank">D. G. Myers' essay at <em>Books and Culture</em> on the "Catholic novelists" Giraldi and Christopher Beha</a><br /><br /><a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2014/12/this-year-in-reading-2-hold-dark.html" target="_blank">My initial&nbsp;thoughts on&nbsp;Giraldi's <em>Hold the Dark</em></a><br /><em></em><br /><a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/06/christian-wiman-and-limits-of-modern.html" target="_blank">Some of my thoughts on the relationship between narrative and the spiritual journey</a><br /><br />I hope to have the first installment of my series of posts on <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/02/literature-for-modern-mind-introduction.html" target="_blank">"Literature for the Modern Mind"</a> up soon. Stay tuned!Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-17379093952072484732016-02-26T13:38:00.001-05:002016-02-26T13:39:16.205-05:00Weekend Reads and Thoughts: Feb 26It's been a while since I've posted any links, and I've had some saved for some time now, so here they are to peruse at your leisure:<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/books-smell-like-old-people-the-decline-of-teen-reading" target="_blank">Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?</a></b><br />by David Denby, <i>The New Yorker</i><br /><i><br /></i>This article seems to be largely taken from material in David Denby's new book,<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lit-Up-Reporter-Schools-Twenty-four/dp/0805095853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1456510803&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=lit+up" target="_blank"> <i>Lit Up</i></a>, in which the <i>New Yorker </i>critic&nbsp;spends time in high school English classrooms to figure out if, and how, students can be taught to appreciate great literature in the age of smartphones. From what I gather from the article, Denby sees rays of light in the interactions great teachers have with students, but is a realist when it comes to just how much good this can do in an age when students are transfixed by their constantly flickering screens.<br /><br />Over the course of the next month I'll be reviewing Denby's book for a Catholic publication, and I'll post the link here when the review runs.<br /><br /><b><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/opinion/smartphone-era-politics.html" target="_blank">Smartphone Era Politics</a></b><br />by Roger Cohen, <i>The New York Times</i><br /><i><br /></i>While we're on depressing subjects, here's a lament for the loss of readers, and real community, in the twittering age. I don't know if what's more disheartening--the world Cohen describes, or the fact that this kind of lament has become so routine, proof that this distracted isolation has permanently lodged itself in us like a cancer that we tolerate because we are too busy to be bothered with seeking medical care.<br /><br /><b><a href="http://americamagazine.org/issue/teacher-heal-thyself" target="_blank">Teacher, Heal Thyself</a></b><br />by Ray Schroth, S.J., <i>America Magazine</i><br /><i><br /></i>Fr. Schroth has been with <i>America </i>for over 60 years, teaching for much of that time, and has compiled some excellent bits of wisdom here from his experience. His piece exemplifies, I think, a truly Catholic approach to education--practical, rooted in personal encounter, and steeped in great literature.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-25804230971695629142016-02-19T10:53:00.004-05:002017-04-27T21:41:40.437-04:00Literature for the Modern Mind: An Introduction<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pX19IudrXGw/Vsc6ajTD_RI/AAAAAAAABAE/6NjvBcwAm2c/s1600/used.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pX19IudrXGw/Vsc6ajTD_RI/AAAAAAAABAE/6NjvBcwAm2c/s320/used.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>One of my major motivations for starting this blog, a year and a half ago, was my desire to sort things out for myself as a teacher of literature in a Catholic school. After several years of teaching, I had come to understand that the modern high school student is starved in many areas that should be of concern to Catholic educators.</div><a name='more'></a><br />Not the least of these is the inner life. Regardless of their academic ability, students in general seem to lack a vocabulary for speaking about those parts of themselves that they cannot quantify. What drives them? What moves them? What brings them hope, or fear, or joy? When do they feel empty, or fulfilled, and why? Because our age has little to offer them in the way of answers, they have little to say. In more religious terms, students lack the ability to discern and give voice to movements in their souls. This realm seems so subjective and ephemeral—what could there possibly be to say about it that would not be conjecture? After all, these inner things are just feelings, and feelings, like opinions (so the logic goes) exist in the hermetically sealed interior, unable to be affirmed, contradicted, or related to anyone else’s private experience. Much easier to stick to the world of matter, where things are clear and easy to speak about.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This rift between mind and matter is the hallmark of our modern age, I would argue. It is a kind of contemporary Gnosticism, and we see its effects everywhere, especially in our art. (<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/02/making-the-garden" target="_blank">See Christopher Alexander </a>to get a sense of how this reveals itself in our modern architecture, <a href="https://vimeo.com/112655231" target="_blank">or Roger Scruton </a>for a penetrating take on its effects on modern visual art and music.) I would suggest that the stereotypical modern literary novel, in which not too much happens outside of characters’ heads—and thus the ultimate measure of which is not the workings of the plot but the deftness of the author’s prose in describing what goes on inside that hermetically sealed chamber—is another effect, or casualty, if you will, of the modern rift.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We see the rift in how we think about ethics. If mind is ultimately a private sphere that just happens to be yoked to a hulking, smelly mass called a body, then how can what we dwell upon in its chamber be measured against anything else? Or how can what we do with our own bodies be likewise weighed, since such a weighing would imply that they have a purpose, and are not just accidentally attached to us? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Thus the only real measure of our behavior becomes whether or not we infringe upon the rights of others. This is essentially a contractual understanding of morality, for infringement implies a violation of the stated (or implied) will of another. If others consent to whatever it is we engage in with them, there is no infringement, and thus no real issue. Ask any teenager, even the most morally uptight—they may assert that certain behaviors are right and certain behaviors are wrong, but they will have a hard time explaining why unless it comes to a situation where there is a clear violation of the rights of another individual, such as theft or physical assault. And hey, to be honest, I have a hard time, too—our society is no longer oriented toward transcendent law, religious or otherwise.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m not trying to write an ethical treatise here, so I’ll get to my point. Un-doing this rending of mind and body is no easy chore, but it is an essential one for Catholic educators, for Christianity, along with the other major monotheistic faiths, is founded on the union of the two spheres.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Literature class is where this re-grafting can happen. And I think this framework of re-grafting, of reuniting the physical with the spiritual, can help teachers of literature select works when they’re putting together their reading lists. I don’t think it should be the only measure by which we select our literature, but it should be an important one, if not the most important one.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s hard here precisely to say what I mean without sounding formulaic and trite, and I want to avoid that, because that is exactly the wrong direction to head. But I guess I really mean what Flannery O’Connor did when she talked about a Catholic novelist as one who was open to mystery, rather than one committed to filling his or her fiction with moral behavior. Hers is not an unimportant point: if we are aiming to use literature as a way of introducing our students to a Catholic worldview, simply eliminating stories with objectionable behavior will not do the trick. (Of course, any teacher needs to use discretion when assigning what to read. But if violence and sex are out, well, there goes all of Shakespeare.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The idea of “mystery” is essentially what I’m trying to get at, for the world cannot be mysterious when mind and matter are spinning on different axes, as our age likes to think that they are. Mystery results when spirit and flesh intersect, when each realm has purchase on the other and constantly draws the other to itself.&nbsp; </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">All good art tends toward mystery, I think, in trying to give meaning to our lives, even if that meaning is only acknowledged by the hole where it should be. To suggest that our lives have meanings, however hazy it may appear, is to attempt to allow matter and spirit to speak to each other. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Some works of literature do this more dramatically, more recognizably, and more effectively than others. Which works these are, or at least have been for me, is what I’d like to address in a series of upcoming posts.&nbsp; This series will probably (read—most definitely) be broken up by other posts, so I’ll try to keep them numbered to maintain a semblance of order.</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">A few disclaimers: it’s doubtful that I will finish what I set out to accomplish, so I expect to peter out before I write about all the books, plays, and poems I intended to. Not all the works will be by Catholic authors, though some will be. Most of the works will be canonical, and thus familiar to many, but, in trying to write about the way in which they address this problem of the bifurcated self, I hope to say something that appears fresh. I’ll try to mix up older works with more recent ones, but don’t be surprised if many of the works are old, because ones from the modern age—the last 100 years—will more likely be symptomatic of the conundrum than offer a way out. We’ll see where this goes!</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-899551722849339292016-02-08T06:07:00.000-05:002017-04-27T21:45:14.599-04:00Maclean on Teaching<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LT705Pt4DLs/Vrh2_zzYvxI/AAAAAAAAA_s/xSOc3jY61V8/s1600/macleanbw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LT705Pt4DLs/Vrh2_zzYvxI/AAAAAAAAA_s/xSOc3jY61V8/s320/macleanbw.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As I mentioned in my previous post, Norman Maclean, for most of his career, was not a fiction writer but a professor at the University of Chicago. He was a good one, too, winning the university's Quantrell Award for Teaching Excellence twice, once in the beginning of his career (1941), and once toward the end (1973).</span><br /><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">On the occasion of the second award, he delivered a speech on the art of teaching, "This Quarter I am Taking McKeon," which is collected in <i>The Norman Maclean Reader</i>. The McKeon of the title refers to Richard McKeon, the University of Chicago philosopher renowned for his demanding classes. McKeon, Mclean, R.S. Crane, and other Chicago scholars formed what was known as the "Chicago School" of critics who brought the structural insights of Aristotle to bear on literature. <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/nmr_lear.html" target="_blank">Maclean's classic essay on </a><i><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/nmr_lear.html" target="_blank">King Lear</a> </i>is a great example of this approach.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the Quantrell Award speech, Maclean, with trademark wit and Western toughness, offers three tentative definitions of teaching. Though from a different era than our own, they offer valuable insight into those intangibles that distinguish a life-changing class from a mediocre one.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, Maclean suggests that &nbsp;"a great teacher is a tough guy who cares deeply about something that is hard to understand." The "tough guy" line is classic Maclean, who was happy to play cowboy for the Chicago crowd because the persona was not altogether fabricated. In interviews late in life, after the publication of <i>A River Runs Through It</i>, he frequently referred to himself, in his childhood, as a "tough flower girl," a mama's boy who loved to romp in the Montana wilderness.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">In his own writing, Maclean shows great respect for "tough" artists of various kinds<span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.4px;">: for his&nbsp;</span></span>brother Paul, a master of the art of fly-fishing, for Bill Bell, an expert mule packer in the Forest Service in the days before machines were able to bring supplies into the deep wilderness, for Albert Michelson, a Nobel-winning scientist and expert billiards player, and for the smokejumpers who defied nature by jumping from a plane into burning timber. For Maclean, a teacher was no different, someone who not only knew an immense amount about a subject, but who brought a requisite seriousness and toughness to a difficult art. Reading Shakespeare, or lyric poetry (two of Maclean's specialties), in his eyes, were kinds of crafts that were best learned from a master. That master, ideally, is the teacher, who does not merely impart wisdom but models the processes of reading, writing, and thinking.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Maclean offers a second definition, tongue-halfway-in-cheek, that uses vogue Freudian terms to describe teaching as "the art of enticing the Ego to seduce the Id into its services." Here he touches upon the importance of desire for education, <a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2016/01/eros-and-modern-student.html" target="_blank">which I've written about recently.</a>&nbsp;Maclean, as I mentioned, was a good Aristotilean, so he had no problem distinguishing between higher and lower realms of the human spirit. If teachers are to succeed, he suggests, they must redirect their students' desire&nbsp;from lower realms to higher ones.&nbsp;<i>Eros </i>is not eliminated but reoriented towards a different kind of beauty. One can sense this in Maclean's presentation of the artists I mentioned above, where he aims, I would argue, at two things<span style="font-size: 12pt;">—revealing to his readers the art of his subject, but also doing so in a way that is beautiful itself, and thus draws the reader on two fronts. The teacher's role is the same here as the writer's: to&nbsp;</span>point students toward beauty in a way that is itself beautiful.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, Maclean turns to his minister father, his own first teacher, who taught him how to write by demanding that he revise compositions by cutting their word counts in half, often repeatedly. Maclean suggests that his father, if asked, would have said that "teaching is the art of conveying the delight that comes from an act of the spirit without ever giving anyone the notion that the delight comes easy." In a sense, this definition is not so distant from the first one about being a "tough guy." The processes of reading, writing, and thinking well are not easy. They require hard work, patience, and the ability to delay gratification indefinitely. Many writers (including this one!) would say that, when it comes to composition, concomitant gratification never really arrives,&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 12pt;">that any delight we may find actually is found in the hard work itself.&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In other words, in this last definition, the good teacher, in not pretending that "delight comes easy," does not dissimulate but is honest. Delight does not come easy. If it did, it would not be as delightful. The teacher's job is to first experience that hard-earned delight, and then somehow convey it by drawing students, a little bit at a time, into the v</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">ery difficulties of the process. Quite an art indeed.</span></span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-66707127475386804282016-01-26T20:38:00.003-05:002017-04-27T21:41:40.459-04:00On Norman Maclean<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lAfvHJLPXkw/VqgdVGRcEiI/AAAAAAAAA_U/RusAp7LZX4k/s1600/MacleanCabinSeeleyLakeScan2-SM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lAfvHJLPXkw/VqgdVGRcEiI/AAAAAAAAA_U/RusAp7LZX4k/s320/MacleanCabinSeeleyLakeScan2-SM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />In spent the better part the 2000s in Western Montana, first working at a summer camp in the Seeley-Swan Valley, and then at graduate school in Missoula. I wasn't long in the area before people started urging me to read Norman Maclean. I had never heard of him before, but soon realized that he was a laureate of sorts for Montanans in general, and thanks to <i>A River Runs Through It</i>,&nbsp;for Montana fly fishermen in particular.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>It was not long before I, too, fell in love with Maclean's work. In his writing, Western Montana becomes a land of myth, where the shadows its forests and mountains cast seem to stretch into deepest recesses of the human heart. This is as true in his autobiographical novella (and the two short stories published along with it) as it is in his much acclaimed <i>Young Men and Fire</i>, a work of non-fiction about a smoke-jumping disaster along the Missouri River north of Helena in the late 1940s.<br /><br />Most of Maclean's life was spent not as a writer (he didn't publish <i>A River Runs Through It </i>until he was in his seventies) but&nbsp;as a professor of literature at the University of Chicago, where his students included novelist Philip Roth and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Shakespeare, and Shakespearean tragedy, were Maclean's specialties. His <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/nmr_lear.html" target="_blank">excellent scholarly essay</a> on of&nbsp;<i>King Lear </i>displays his mastery of Shakespeare and the tragic form, largely defined by Aristotle.<br /><br />I was reminded of all of this when I came across <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/river-runs" target="_blank">Timothy Schilling's essay on Maclean </a>in the latest edition of <i>Commonweal</i>. Schilling considers perhaps the two strongest motifs in Maclean's writing: tragedy and the Christian faith. You might remember, if you've ever seen the film version of <i>A River Runs Through It</i>, that<i>&nbsp;</i>Maclean was a preacher's son, and though "there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing" in his family, nothing could compete with religion when it came to matters of importance. As Schilling points out, Maclean's work is steeped in the Bible, especially the Psalms and the <i>logos </i>of&nbsp;John's Gospel--think of the penultimate line of <i>A River Runs Through It</i>: "Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."<br /><br />Schilling does a marvelous job of weighing Maclean's emphasis on the tragic nature of human existence against his inability, though he stopped practicing organized religion, to shake the hope for eternal life found in the Christian faith. The essay is well worth reading.<br /><br />I wrote an article, several years ago, on Maclean's sense of craftsmanship, found, I argued, not just in his fiction but in his <i>Lear </i>essay as well. <a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/09/norman-maclean-and-the-question-of-craft/" target="_blank">The essay was published at <i>Front Porch Republic</i></a>.<br /><br />Note: The picture above is of Maclean's family cabin on Seeley Lake in Western Montana. On a whim in graduate school I decided to drive out to find it (the picture, though, is not mine). I drove the long dirt road that loops through the Larch forest around the western side of the lake, where Maclean's father built the cabin in the early 1920s. The cabin was not remarkable.&nbsp;The only identifying mark was a simple wood sigh by the road that read "Maclean." It looked similar to others built along the lake's shore, though perhaps a few decades&nbsp;older. <br /><br />Back in the 1920s there must have been few (if any) other houses in the vicinity. An hour's drive (at today's highway speeds) from Missoula, Seeley is the second large lake&nbsp;you pass as&nbsp;you head into the deep woods of the Seeley-Swan valley. The elder Maclean hoped it would remain less developed than the southernmost lake in the chain. That lake is Salmon Lake, where I worked, for three summers during college, at a camp run by the Diocese of Helena. Ironically, Seeley is now the most lived-on lake, by far, in the valley. We're talking Montana standards here, so the summer population swells to perhaps a few thousand residents. The Macleans' cabin,&nbsp;I believe,&nbsp;is still in the family, and&nbsp;frequently occupied&nbsp;by John, Norman's son, who is an author in his own right.<br /><br />Norman visited the cabin each summer during his tenure at Chicago, and it was there, in his later years, that he wrote <i>A River Runs Through It</i>&nbsp;and <i>Young Men and Fire</i>.<br /><br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6557781995088033595.post-52733501245467899442016-01-19T13:57:00.003-05:002017-04-27T21:42:59.748-04:00Eros and the Modern Student<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fBprMfH-ie0/Vp6GWxt1M1I/AAAAAAAAA_A/w2hdszySiU0/s1600/QB_Swan_Lake_11_event.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="125" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fBprMfH-ie0/Vp6GWxt1M1I/AAAAAAAAA_A/w2hdszySiU0/s320/QB_Swan_Lake_11_event.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div>In my recent post “<a href="http://thecatholiclitclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-interminable-practice-fable.html" target="_blank">The Endless Practice</a>,” I wrote a fable of sorts involving a young boy who wants nothing else but to learn how to play baseball after seeing a professional game. Soon, though, he loses his enthusiasm after joining a baseball league in which he plays no games but simply practices the isolated skills, over and over again, that the sport involves. I hope the message wasn’t too obscure. In order for an educational experience to succeed, it must nurture desire.<br /><a name='more'></a><div><br /></div><div>After his initial trip to the ballpark, the boy fell in love with the game, and was raring to learn. He had been transported by the sights and sounds of the park, the action and excitement of the game itself, and was eager to take up the sport, so that he too might take part in the game of baseball. Desire gave birth to practice, and the important skills of fielding and hitting and running the bases were a joy to learn.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>What he desired, though, was not this or that skill but the game itself. The discrete skills that a team works on at practice only make sense in the larger context of the nine-inning, head-to-head competition called a baseball game. Remove the game from the equation, and you remove that thing which gives meaning to all the rest. You remove that one thing necessary to plant the seeds of desire in all those who participate.</div><div><br /></div><div>I see similar forces at work in my daughters’ interest in ballet. They are three and five years old, too young to be really serious students of the art, but they’ve been infatuated with it for over a year now, and are old enough to learn steps and positions and all the French names for the moves. Their excitement for it is palpable. They count down the days until their once-a-week practice at the ballet studio, and are locked-in when their teacher speaks to the class. At least once a day they put on their ballet clothes at home and practice their pliés and tendus on the hardwood floor.</div><div><br /></div><div>Why are they so attentive at practice? Why so enthusiastic? It’s because they’ve been exposed to real ballet. We’ve shown them Tchaikovsky’s <i>Swan Lake</i> and the <i>Sleeping Beauty</i> and <i>The Nutcracker</i> on Youtube (the above picture is from <i>Swan Lake</i>) and they have listened to the scores over and over. When they hear the music or see the Sugar Plum Fairy dance across the stage, they are transfixed. They’ve been exposed to something that moves them, something for which they hold nothing but awe and admiration. They’ve been exposed to beauty, through Tchaikovsky’s art.</div><div><br /></div><div>Desire follows beauty. The repetitive practice necessary to develop as a ballerina (at least to the degree appropriate for a pre-schooler) becomes a joy when it is colored by the desire to participate in something beautiful. I don’t mean to suggest that ballet practice, for them, might never, at points, grow unpleasant. Right now it is not—ballet practice is an unequivocal joy for them—but I can imagine that as they grow, even if they retain a love of the art they might not be as enthusiastic about practicing as the moves get more challenging, the drills more repetitive.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there’s a difference between something that is temporarily unpleasant and something that is a real burden. As long as my daughters are moved by the art, I won’t worry about them feeling, like my hypothetical baseball player did, that practice is a burden. Repeating moves and positions may grow unpleasant at times, but it will not be burdensome if it is understood to be a working toward gracefulness. As long as their desire is fed, they will want to develop their skills.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the young boy on the baseball team, the very thing that got him excited about baseball was unquantifiable: seeing the game itself, being moved by beauty. He felt a natural response to it, and I’m sure we can all relate to this in some area of our lives, past or present, where we have felt suddenly charged by the desire to do everything we can to become great at something. This kind of desire is well translated by the Greek <i>eros</i>. It implies a longing, and though it is not limited to the sexual realm its notion encompasses the kind of passion found there. Eros colors everything the boy hears and learns and practices about baseball. It is the one thing necessary for everything else to fall into place. Eros is not taught, because it is already part of him, as it is already part of each of us. It simply needs a reason to emerge.</div><div><br /></div><div>And what is that reason? What unleashes desire in us? Simply put, beautiful things. Baseball. Ballet. The intricacies of the cell. A great story. A mind-bending jazz solo. A philosopher’s brilliant insight. A persuasively argued point. Great architecture. Once moved by something beautiful, we desire to grow closer to it, through developing our own skills in the field and working toward beauty in ourselves.</div><div><br /></div><div>That is why beauty seems to me to be the key to education. Not critical thinking, not reading comprehension, not generating innovative, original ideas. All of these follow from desire, which is a response to something beautiful.</div><div><br /></div><div>For these reasons, exposing students—especially high school students, who are ready to make their education their own—to great works of art must be the beginning of any study of the humanities. A literature class must begin not with a study of iambic pentameter or the difference between a simile and a metaphor but with introducing students to beautiful stories, poetry, and plays. It’s sad to say that this doesn’t always happen. The first thing that comes to students’ mind, when they reflect back on a year of high school English, should be the two or three novels that stood out to them, or perhaps a few lines of a sonnet, or a powerful scene from a play. Unfortunately, from my experience, it’s frequently the definitions of various literary terms, or a few funny-sounding vocabulary words that they can recall from their workbooks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the connection between beauty and learning is most clearly seen in music education. A student of jazz does not learn to play his instrument well by memorizing scales and rhythms and reharmonization techniques. To learn how to play jazz one must first listen to jazz, and good jazz, to giants like Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, etc. If a student is not moved by the beauty of this music, he will never get anywhere as a musician. His skills will never transcend the wooden routines of practice. If he is moved, however, he will desire to be a part of this art himself, and so the skills that he will acquire through practice—the scales and rhythms and reharmonizations—will always be contextualized by the beauty of the art form. And a jazz student will constantly be applying these skills to his own performance. Learning the harmonic minor scale, for instance, is not simply a skill to have but a way to sound beautiful when playing over a set of particular chord changes. As I’ve seen in my involvement with the music program at my own high school, great musicians, and great bands, are not necessarily the ones who practice the most but the ones who listen the most. Listening to great music comes first; practice follows.</div><div><br /></div><div>Beauty and desire are by nature immeasurable, unable to be chopped up and re-grafted into educational standards. Certain things can, of course. Lexiles. Vocabulary. Grammar skills. Even reading comprehension, to some extent, can be measured and standardized. But, as I sought to explain through the example of my hypothetical baseball league, skills like these lose their meaning when isolated from those beautiful things of which they are parts.</div><div><br /></div><div>The modern educational model is completely unable to devote time to anything that is not quantifiable. This is not surprising, for our culture has the same deficit. We can see this most recently in the conspicuous absence of literature from the Common Core standards. The assumption is that given the shockingly low reading and writing abilities of the modern student, we need to double-down on their skills. Is a student reading at a third-grade level in eighth grade? Drill her on reading comprehension by giving her informational documents to read and quizzing her on them. Is a student writing in incomplete sentences even though he is a senior in high school? Bombard him with grammar exercises until his head spins.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>So the logic goes. I wish I could say that there's a light at the end of this tunnel of madness, but don't count on it. We have grown so obsessed with data—not just our educational system but our entire culture—that I can't see it getting any better until it gets much, much worse.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nothing will have a lasting effect on a student—especially high school students, positioned as they are to grow as individuals, as I mentioned earlier—unless that student desires to learn. And this is accomplished not by drilling them on isolated skills but by showing them their inherent unity in an art form. Contra the current model, the real way to combat student apathy and poor test scores is by exposing them to great art.</div><div><br /></div><div>And so the role of the teacher, firstly, is to show students what is beautiful. For this reason we must keep ourselves close to great literature, film, music, or whatever pertains to our field. How will our students be moved unless they see that we are, also?</div></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18317282542160314220noreply@blogger.com0